Claude Brown

Education: Howard University and Rutgers Law School.

Delinquency History: Graduated from youthful fights and shoplifting to drug sales and assault. He served time in a New York juvenile detention center, and two upstate youth training schools, including the Wiltwyck and Warwick schools for boys.

"When the bus was all loaded and ready to take us back to the Youth House, one of the boys in the seat behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Hey, shorty, ain't that your mother standin' on the court stoop? Man, she's cryin."

"I said, 'So what?' as if I didn't care. But I cared. I had to care. That was the first time I had seen Mama crying like that. She was just standing there by herself, not moving, not making a sound as if she didn't even know it was cold out there. The sun was shining, but it was cold and there was ice on the ground. The tears just kept rolling down Mama's face as the bus started to pull away from the curb. I had to care. Those tears shining on Mama's face were falling for me. When the bus started down the street, I wanted to run back and say something to Mama. I didn't know what. I thought, maybe I woulda said, "Mama, I didn't mean what I said, 'cause I really do care." No, I wouldn'a say that. I woulda said, "Mama, button up your coat. It's cold out here." Yeah, that's what I forgot to say to Mama."—Manchild in the Promised Land, 1965.

Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, published in 1965, just as America's involvement in the Vietnam War was escalating, is an autobiography of his youth in Harlem, New York; the story of how he survived "street life." Brown originally thought he might sell 100 copies of the book, but he soon received letters from soldiers overseas that foretold the 4 million copies it would sell, and how important Manchild would become.

"I would get letters from brothers who were stationed in Vietnam, who were from places that I didn't think had blacks," Brown says. "They would write things like, 'Hey brother, are you sure your father didn't have a twin, because he sure sounds like mine.' And some would say, 'thanks for writing our story.'"

"I realized after reading some of these letters, this wasn't just my biography. It was the biography of an entire generation of African Americans," he says. "And that is why it sold so many copies, and that's why it was such a significant contribution to American literature at the time."

Sadly, the story of today's African-American boys too often includes a chapter with a mother crying on the court house steps as their children are bussed away. But today, Claude Brown knows they are less likely to end up in the nurturing environment he wrote about in Manchild, the Wiltwyck School for Boys in upstate New York (to which he dedicated the book). Instead, they are heading to adult prisons or crumbling juvenile detention centers. The 62-year-old author and intellectual spends plenty of time with young offenders in America's jails, prisons and detention centers, and thinks he knows at least some of the reasons why it's hard for them to climb out of the "street life."

"One of the worst things that happened in my lifetime was the demise of the Wiltwyck school, and so many [other] facilities when they were most needed," he says. "There should have been a hundred more of this type of facility."

He knows, too, that reforming programs for the nation's at-risk youth is more complicated than just building 100 more training schools. While he dedicates his book to Wiltwyck, where he was sent at age 11, Brown kept committing crimes well into his late teens, long after leaving Wiltwyck, and even after several stints in Warwick, a more hardened upstate school for juvenile offenders.

"When Manchild first came out, everybody asked, 'How did you do it, what's the formula?'," he says. "There are no formulas for life."

Claude Brown's crime run began at the tender age of 8. His father, a dock worker, would frequently beat him and his siblings when they got into trouble, and his mother struggled with the juvenile court to get him into the best state delinquency programs. But nothing seemed to prevent Brown from breaking the law. In spite of his unstable, alcoholic father, and the poverty of his youth, his siblings all grew up to lead normal lives.

Wiltwyck was the first place Claude Brown met any African-Americans who finished high school, let alone college. He found positive influences in the kinds of adults he met there.

"I was the black sheep of the family," he says. "Also, life on the streets, it was pretty exciting life for an 8-year-old."

He started stealing from cash registers, shoplifting, and playing hooky at age 9. The court made his parents send him to live with grandparents in South Carolina for a year. As soon as he came back, he began running with his old gang again, stealing and fighting. After a series of stints in New York City's juvenile home, Brown was 11 when the court ordered him to Wiltwyck for two-and-a-half years.

While he kept up a reputation as the school's bad boy, he found positive influences in the kinds of adults he met there. Wiltwyck was the first place Brown met any African-Americans who finished high school, let alone college. He also wrote warmly of dinners he spent at Eleanor Roosevelt's home, who helped found the school (and to whom he also dedicated the book).

But it was his relationship with a white man, with the European executive director of the school, that left the most lasting impression on him. At Wiltwyck, Brown constantly battled with Ernst Papanek for the loyalty of the school's residents. Only after he left did he and Papanek become friends, and did he come to appreciate his help, and the other staff at Wiltwyck. Papanek kept in touch with Brown over the years and encouraged him to go back to school. Even at Warwick, the much tougher training school he later attended, he found positive influences in Mrs. Cohen, who gave Brown books to read, and encouraged him to finish high school and told him he was smart enough to go to college.

"Eventually, it started getting to me," Brown says. But the positive influences in his life were balanced by negative ones, forcing him to choose his future.

"I spent a lot of time in correction facilities with adults and adolescents, and it is one of my deepest convictions that, of the guys I grew up with, most of them didn't have to be there."

After Wiltwyck, he returned to a life of crime, culminating in him getting shot in the abdomen and nearly dying while attempting to steal some bed sheets to finance drug purchases. Despite three more stints at Warwick, Brown continued to graduate to more serious offenses, including selling marijuana, then cocaine. The pieces finally came together in his life when a junkie named "Limpy" stole his drug stash at gunpoint. If Brown was going to stay in the game and maintain his reputation, he would have to shoot Limpy dead. A friend urged Brown to get out.

"I think if anybody on Eighth Avenue ever makes it, I think it could be you," the friend said. As he tells it today, Brown didn't really want to go to school, "but it seemed like the only exit."

Brown told his customers he was out of business, got some odd jobs to pay his way through, moved downtown to Greenwich Village and started evening high school when he was 17. He credits some of his success climbing out of street life to the luck of missing the scourge of heroin in Harlem—something he vividly describes in Manchild as having destroyed the next generation of Harlem hoods. Gradually, he parted ways with his gang. As his friends graduated from training school, to prison, he married a woman he met in night school and finally began to learn enough to seek out a college education.

In 1959, Brown entered Howard University in Washington, and on a visit the following year to Harlem, he saw how far he was from street life. He remembers getting off a bus in his old neighborhood, when he heard a familiar voice call his name.

"This guy I had been to Wiltwyck with, and Warwick with, says "man, I just got out of Sing (Sing Sing State Prison). 'Everybody's up there, and we've been looking for you. If you were up there, we'd be running the joint.'"

Brown remembers his friend mentioning that he saved seats for him in all the different juvenile jails and prisons that defined his life. By the time he got to Sing, he decided, Brown wasn't going to show.

"And then he said in an accusatory tone, 'You know what someone said about you. Somebody said, you went to college.' And I said, 'Ah, you know, somebody is always lying about somebody or something.'"

"It was almost as if we had tacitly pledged allegiance to the criminal life," Brown says. "And you sort of felt like a traitor."

As he worked his way through a liberal arts degree at Howard, working part-time as a postal clerk, Brown began writing short stories and articles for non-paying intellectual magazines like Dissent (where his work was edited by Norman Mailer) and Commentary. At Howard, novelist Toni Morrison was his writing teacher. She frequently read and critiqued his early work. A publisher from MacMillan who had read some of these articles took Brown out for lunch, ("got me drunk," he says) and convinced him to write something about life in Harlem.

At that point, the longest thing Brown ever wrote was a 20-page short story. He had no idea how to write a book. Six months later, long after he spent the publisher's advance, he was nowhere. Then, he picked a copy of Richard Wright's Eight Men, a collection of short stories of eight people's lives, and it inspired him enough to write about Harlem through his own life story.

"I didn't know anything other than my own life, so that was what I wrote," he says. "I know people like to idealize things more, like, 'wrote to correct the world,' but that's how it happened."

"One of the worst things that happened in my lifetime was the demise of the Wiltwyck school, and so many [other] facilities when they were most needed. There should have been a hundred more of this type of facility."

Almost 35 years, and 4 million copies later, Manchild has become the second best selling book MacMillan ever published (the first was Gone with the Wind), and it was published in 14 languages. It launched his career as a writer, giving him a platform to publish in Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look and The New York Times Magazine. For a while, he attended law school, but dropped out when his writing and lectures developed into a full career.

Meanwhile, Brown started a family. He has two children by two marriages, and now, a grandson. Though living in Newark, New Jersey, he is still involved in Harlem and helping kids out of the street life. He works to maintain a program that mentors kids from Harlem, and helps them go to college. Brown also supports a Newark-based program that diverts kids caught up in the court system into an intensive eight week residential treatment program that tries to turn young people's lives around.

"All these kids get a copy of Manchild, and I come in to talk to them when they come in, and 8 weeks later," Brown says. "You get a lot of interesting turn-around, and positive changes."

While Brown sees more positive changes, and positive influences in community structures than ever before, he argues that at-risk kids have greater needs than ever before. That, and a mix of harder drugs, and change in culture, produced a different kind of childhood criminal than he and his gang were. In the 1980s and early 90s, Brown spent many of his visits to juvenile detention centers and prisons trying to understand the senseless violence being committed by muggers. Why, he asked, were their victims shot dead, for "chump change"?

"You shoot them if they don't have any money. You shoot them after they give it up. Why?" Brown asked. "And they would tell me things like, 'Well, it's what you do.' And I would say, 'No, I've been there. That's not what you do.'"

Exasperated, Brown finally asked: "Do you mean that [shooting your victims] is like, style, like wearing blue jeans? And they would say, 'yeah, that's it.'"

Brown thinks many of these kids he has visited in detention are victims of a kind of "society endorsed abandonment," and that that is the heart of the juvenile crime problem. "The most common form of child abuse in America, regardless of socioeconomic status, is neglect," Brown says. "The rich abandon their kids to boarding schools, and the poor, to TV. What happens when you abandon a whole generation to TV is you get a lot of kids who think, 'TV's not real, maybe I'm not real, either.' 'Let's go out and shoot somebody.' You want to cut crime, we have to stop abandoning our kids."

Positive Change. Positive Influences. Claude Brown says he believes, instinctively, that most of the kids he ran with, along with most of the kids today can be turned around.

"They were good people," he says of his former street gang. "I spent a lot of time in correctional facilities with adults and adolescents, and it is one of my deepest convictions that, of the guys I grew up with, most of them didn't have to be there. They weren't necessarily bad or evil, they did the natural thing and succumbed to the environment. And every time I walk out of those huge prison gates, I sense, I could have been here."