J. Mason Brewer was a noted educator, historian, poet, storyteller, and folklorist. Born in Goliad, Texas in 1896—a place that through the voices of his father and grandfathers instilled the love for African American stories—J. Mason Brewer devoted his fifty-year career to documenting and preserving African American narratives across Texas and the South. He earned a BA in English at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas in 1917 and during World War I served as translator of French, Italian, and Spanish for the American Expeditionary Forces. As an educator he taught at several public schools and historically Black colleges across the South throughout his career, including Samuel Huston College in Austin. He earned an MA in folklore from Indiana University under Stith Thompson in 1933. He later returned to chair the English, Language and Literature Department at Huston-Tillotson College (formerly Samuel Huston College) and taught at East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas (now Texas A&M University-Commerce) until his death in 1975.

Over his notable career, Brewer broke down numerous barriers such as becoming the first African American to serve on the Executive Board of AFS and serving as vice president, being the first Black who was an active member of the Texas Folklore Society, and being among the first African Americans to obtain a degree from an academic folklore program. Brewer was also awarded prestigious research grants from organizations such as the American Philosophical Society, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Mexico, and the National University of Mexico and was posthumously recognized by AFS with the Compañero/a de las Americas award for his “outstanding contributions to the further understanding of folk traditions in the Americas and the Caribbean.”

J. Mason Brewer began collecting African American folktales through fieldwork long before he came into contact with academic folklore. Viewed as a counterpart to Zora Neale Hurston, Brewer published dozens of books and articles on African American folklore and history in Texas and other Southern states, African influences in Mexican folklore, as well as his own poetry during his prolific fifty-year career. Among his acclaimed works are:

The Word on the Brazos: Negro Preacher Tales from the Brazos Bottoms of Texas (1953)

American Negro Folklore (1969)

Phyllis M. May-Machunda