![]() When he was still young, he was expelled from school in the years that follow, he was repeatedly arrested, and, at one point, was shot in the stomach. They were, like many others they met in Harlem, ambitious people who’d left the Jim Crow South for the promise of upward mobility, only to encounter ruinous poverty and segregated isolation up North.īrown was born in 1937, and nicknamed Sonny, which is the name that he gave to his book’s protagonist. ![]() ![]() Brown’s family came to New York from rural South Carolina, where his parents had been sharecroppers. In January, 1965, one month before Malcolm X was shot to death in Harlem, two months before civil-rights protesters were brutally attacked in Selma, and seven months before riots overwhelmed the segregated Watts section of Los Angeles, Claude Brown published his first book, “ Manchild in the Promised Land.” The book is, in name, a novel, but was always understood to be a memoir of Brown’s youth, a street-level portrait of post-Great Migration Harlem. ![]() Photograph from The Bettmann Archive / Getty ![]()
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