[1][2] His mother Grace Adelaide Brown, who had been the valedictorian of her class at Fisk University,[3] taught in D.C. public schools for more than 50 years.

Graduating from Williams Phi Beta Kappa in 1922, he continued his studies at Harvard University, receiving an MA in English a year later.

In his creative work, Brown often imitated southern African-American speech, using "variant spellings and apostrophes to mark dropped consonants".

It was a collection of poems, many with rural themes, and treated the simple lives of poor, black, country folk with poignancy and dignity.

Like that of Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and other black writers of the period, his work often dealt with race and class in the United States.

part of the Harlem Renaissance artistic tradition, although he spent the majority of his life in the Brookland neighborhood of Northeast Washington, D.C. As a member of the fight for racial equality, Brown stuck to the belief that "the pen is mightier than the sword."

As a member of the NAACP, Brown served on the organization's advisory board and worked with other notable Harlem Renaissance writers including W.E.B.

Working tirelessly in the fight for racial equality, Brown used his platform as a journalist to include his own personal commentaries that appealed to the conscience of white America in the face of a spreading democracy.

[12] In 1982, the City College of New York, awarded him the Langston Hughes Medal In 1984, the District of Columbia named him its first poet laureate, a position he held until his death from leukemia at the age of 88.

[12] The Friends of Libraries USA in 1997 named Founders Hall at Howard University a Literary Landmark, the first so designated in Washington, DC.