After marrying Daisy Turnbull, Brown made the most of the Harlem scene by hobnobbing with black artists. Poet/editor Countée Cullen included him in the anthology Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927); James Weldon Johnson did likewise in The Book of American Negro Poetry (1930), as did Benjamin A. Botkin, editor of Folk–Say (1930). Brown initiated "The Literary Scene: Chronicle and Comment," a column for Opportunity, which helped steer audiences to authentic black literature.
An exacting writer, editor, and critic, Brown thought of himself primarily as a professor of English. He taught at Virginia Seminary and College and at Lincoln, Fisk, and Howard universities. Among his most promising students were actor/playwright Ossie Davis, activist Stokely Carmichael, and Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison; similarly, Brown's Afro-centrism influenced poet Amiri Baraka and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston.
Brown took serious interest in black representation in the arts, as demonstrated by his eloquent artistic commentary and film reviews in Opportunity and by a notable first collection, Southern Road (1932). An energized first-person collection, it took its title from the richly humorous, compassionate material he acquired while teaching in the Jim Crow South. To Brown's dismay, a second collection, No Hiding Place, found no publisher because the Depression ended easy access to white publishing houses, which had once courted black poets.
