Clouds and Sunshine (Paperback or Softback)

Clouds and Sunshine (1920) is a collection of poems by Sarah Lee Brown Fleming. Published during the Harlem Renaissance, Clouds and Sunshine is a powerful work of poetry exploring themes of faith, racial identity, loss, and love in twentieth century America. Recognized as a leading advocate for the advancement of Black girls and women throughout her life, Fleming is a writer whose voice never falters from the task at hand: telling the story of her people. Separated into three sections, Clouds and Sunshine shows Flemings prowess as a lyric poet of the Romantic persuasion, a dialect poet in the tradition of Paul Laurence Dunbar, and a groundbreaking political writer who observed the experiences of Black Americans while recording and examining her own. In “Tuskegee,” she offers an ode to the iconic institution founded by Booker T. Washington in Alabama: “On thy consecrated ground / Is carved a wondrous story, / Out of chaos, Washington / Raised this place to glory.” In “The Black Man’s Hope,” located in the section titled “Race Poems,” Fleming condemns the politics of the United States, which promises so much to white Americans while betraying time and again a people it never meant to recognize as citizens: “I hear the talk of the white man’s hope / In the ring and at the poll, / But never a word of the black man’s hope / Do I hear as time doth roll. // Bowed with the weight which slavery left / Upon his chattled frame, / No star of hope comes into view / The weight is still the same.” In two brief stanzas, Fleming effectively condemns the emptiness offered with every election cycle. Far from despairing, she makes a powerful case for resistance while telling a terrible truth: prejudice is a manmade thing, and only targeted action can undo it. This edition of Sara Lee Brown Fleming’s Clouds and Sunshine is a classic work of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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Sarah Lee Brown Fleming (1876-1963) was an African American poet, novelist, educator, and activist. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Fleming was raised in Brooklyn, where she would become the school system’s first Black teacher. In 1902, she married Richard Stedman Fleming, a pioneering African American dentist with whom she would raise a son and a daughter. In addition to her work as a teacher, Fleming was a founder of the New Haven’s Women’s Civic League and the Phillis Wheatley Home for Girls. A lifelong advocate for Black girls and women, she received honors and awards from the United States Congress and the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Club. She also published works of literature, including Hope’s Highway: A Novel (1918) and Clouds and Sunshine (1920), a collection of poems.