The second decade of the twentieth century gave rise to tumultuous activity, global and national. The United States, like most of the world, was reeling from the aftermath of war and what was portrayed as the ultimate quest for freedom, making the world safe for democracy while the democracy itself was flawed. For most Americans, this was a time of hope for prosperity. Many other Americans, however, faced a different scenario, one of struggle for redemption and mere acceptance as Americans. Foremost among these, in a severely race-conscious culture, were people of color, particularly Americans of African heritage. In many ways, this climate of ambivalent approaches to race-separation clouded and, in some instances, tainted the artistic endeavors by both blacks and whites and frequently resulted in a “white” standard as the dominant factor in criticism. This is especially evident among the poets and writers of the time. On one hand, writers of color striving for success in the mainstream of publishing were expected to adhere to “universal” themes and to avoid “social themes,” relevant to the condition and struggle of people of color desirous of being seen as equally creative and legitimate in comparison to any other artists.
On the other hand, near the end of the second decade of the 1900s, a highly committed cadre of writers of color were involved in igniting the invincible energy of the Harlem Renaissance, perhaps the most noted but not the only cultural, social, artistic, and intellectual movement engineered by people of color in the United States. This kind of renaissance activity was visible in a number of urban cities, not the least of which was Chicago, the home of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize. She received the award in 1950 for Annie Allen.
Born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, Gwendolyn Brooks was the first child of Keziah and David Brooks. While she was still a very young baby, the young couple returned to Chicago, which Brooks considered home and where she lived all her life. The family eventually moved into a home on the South Side, and she and her brother Raymond, who was born in 1918, grew up sharing a strong bond of mutual respect and admiration that would last until Raymond’s death in 1976.
At the time of Brooks’s birth, the racial climate in Chicago, as in most of America, was tense, and two years later came the summer of 1919, which James Weldon Johnson referred to as the “Red Summer” because of the high passions and spilling of much African American blood after proud black soldiers returned to the irony of Jim Crow. Across America, disenchanted Blacks responded to the harsh intimidation and flagrant discrimination at the hands of disgruntled whites, particularly the Ku Klux Klan who remained set against any semblance of racial equality for people of color. Subsequently, at an early age Brooks was exposed to the social restrictions of the time and began to formulate her deep thinking about the vicissitudes of black life and its challenges in the City of Chicago and in America. After graduating from Englewood High School and earning an associates degree from Wilson Junior College in 1936, Brooks continued to expand her literary interests and joined various writers’ groups.
The conflicting experiences of her youth and young adulthood would continue to inform her thinking and her writing. Brooks viewed the world as a place of varied possibilities, and she possessed the sensibilities of one who was opposed to all forms of unfairness and inequity. This consciousness would prevail throughout her career, including the 1960s and 1970s when she acknowledged she had been “introduced” to a radical approach to race-consciousness. In fact, Brooks’s collective experiences shaped her vision to such an extent that even her earliest writing is rarely without the direct focus of race-consciousness and the call for positive self-identity. In this context, the willing reader does not confuse Brooks’s concentration on race with racism. Brooks regularly addresses in her work the injustice that accompanies and drives the negative consequences of a race-based society.
Focusing on life in Chicago, the thriving center of the Midwest, the breadth of Brooks’s writing highlights an entire community and its cross-cultural diversity. As a young adult, Brooks continued to read widely and seek the wisdom of established writers, living and dead. She studied the works of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and was deeply immersed in the works of Emily Dickinson. Not too many readers and critics acknowledge Gwendolyn Brooks’s deep interest in many white writers. Brooks was, in fact, quite open in her appreciation of all humanity and embraced broadly the importance of world literature. Thus even as a self-conscious black artist, Brooks was able, at the same time, to maintain a DuBoisian dual consciousness—the ability to thrive in a world separated by cultural and social expectations. Brooks was also impressed and inspired by the work of James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, and she continued to cultivate an open and lasting affinity with strong black writers who were compelled to portray blacks in a positive light. While a young girl, Brooks met Johnson and Hughes. According to Brooks, the scholarly, aristocratic Johnson was not as warm and welcoming as Langston Hughes, the poet of the “low down folks.” Johnson, whom she met in a Chicago church, offered the young Brooks some general commentary and polite salutations. Hughes, on the other hand, encouraged Brooks to continue writing. In subsequent years, Brooks cultivated a professional relationship with Hughes, whom she first met at the South Side Community Center, where Brooks and other aspiring writers met on a regular basis, under the philanthropic tutelage of white benefactress Inez Cunningham Stark.
Being involved with the many cultural and civic activities in her community, Brooks met her husband, Henry Blakely, also a poet, at an NAACP meeting. It was a meeting, as Brooks often stated, that was sealed by fate. In 1939, they married and had two children, Henry III and Nora. Brooks, however, continued the serious pursuit of writing as a vocation. Throughout her writings, it is apparent that Brooks’s relationships with her family and her community informed the poet’s vision of the universe. Her works frequently focus on the lives and experiences of children, adult male and female relationships, and the day-today struggles of everyday life in the Black community. Brooks’s father, David, was a porter for the McKinley Music Publishing Company, and her mother, Keziah, worked as a domestic for white families. Coming from a working class family, Brooks was quite aware of living in an often hostile social, cultural, and economic environment.
As poet-celebrity, Brooks enjoyed a prolific writing career, beginning with the poet’s earliest fascination with words and ideas and resulting in the publication, as George Kent acknowledges, of her first poem “Eventide” in American Childhood (October 1930). Even at an early age, Brooks’s intentions were firm and her success eminent as she moved into a life of poetry. Brooks went on to become one of the signature voices included in mainstream American literature. Her ability to speak in her own voice while respectfully adhering to “established form” afforded her a respectability that led to a broad acceptance of her verse and sonnets. Her earliest poems were published in the Chicago Defender and soon in more publications, including anthologies of American poetry. An avid student of the local literary scene, she participated in workshops and was introduced to influential resources such as Poetry magazine. Her exposure continued at the Midwestern Writers’ Conference, sponsored by Northwestern University, and her success in these endeavors proved beneficial to her reputation as a writer.
As do most poets with national and international acclaim, Brooks found herself, at different times, in the center of many debates on the role of poetry and, indeed, of the function or duty of the poet. This attention highlights the polemics involved even today—rightly or wrongly—in any discussion of Brooks’s works. Two topics become quite apparent. The first of these, which seems to propagate others, is Brooks’s affinity for Blackness and the Black Aesthetic. The other issue is her refusal to continue to go “mainstream” despite her apparent genius and the effects of this decision, presented by supporters and detractors alike, on the currency of Brooks’s poetry and her status as a world class poet.
Brooks is equally acute in bringing to the surface the life of a community that is separated and suppressed, yet thriving and surviving. In 1945, Gwendolyn Brooks’s first collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, was published by Harper and Brothers. When A Street in Bronzeville appeared in 1945, Brooks began the fulfillment of her lifelong ambition of becoming recognized as a poet. The themes of her first book echo the challenges of people of color. For “Blacks”—the term preferred by Brooks—America was often an inhospitable place of existence and struggle that proved a relentless challenge for survival. The setting for Bronzeville was an actual historic community in South Chicago. A Street in Bronzeville brings to life and makes accessible the real world of “Negro life” at that time in Chicago. In this book that was so well received nationally, Brooks provides for the world a revealing glimpse into the urban life of Black America in one of its most notably populous cities.
The poems in A Street in Bronzeville capture the private and public concerns of Blacks. In several poems, Brooks highlights issues that the community relates on a daily basis. In “a song in the front yard” and in “Negro Hero,” the poet touches on themes to which whole generations might refer in the recollection or research about a people in constant transition, hope, and renewal. In “a song in the front yard,” she opens the poem with the revealing and challenging lines: “I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life / I want a peek at the back.”
These lines suggest the decorum, the control, and sometimes defiance of those locked in a disciplined society, and are indicative of those individuals in the early Black communities in Chicago and those scattered across America: North, South, East, and West. Brooks brings to focus larger issues concerning the status and contributions of Blacks in “Negro Hero.” Though speaking, suggestively, of Dorie Miller, “Negro Hero” chronicles in a convincing way the ability of Brooks to reckon with the past and to chart the future struggles of people of color. The persona in the poem states and highlights the openness of those seeking positive change: “Naturally, the important thing is, I helped to save them / them and a part of their democracy.” In this poem, Brooks strikes a noticeable historical chord as she accentuates the racial and economic divide that greeted Black soldiers returning from every American war.
Focusing on urban Chicago as a thriving center in the Midwest, Brooks portrays an entire community and its varied cultural diversity. This appreciation for the lives in the community can be seen in a sampling of the poems in the collection. The poem “kitchenette building,” for instance, discloses the daily life of those who, in search of a better existence, must yield to priorities of survival. This poem cleverly chronicles the sacrifices of people in search of a dream, and, in some ways, echoes sentiments of Hughes’s famous poem “Dream Deferred” (also known as “Harlem”) that also influenced and provided the title for Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun. The cultural climate of urban Chicago is captured convincingly in “southeast corner,” the poem that allows the reader to experience the full breadth of community life, including the possibly reproachable “Madam.” In “southeast corner,” as in the other poems, Brooks passes no judgment on the persona; she simply portrays the characters as they live. Perhaps, in “Mathew Cole” the reader is, again, provided insight to life in the city and, beyond that, revelation of the raw life of the elderly in isolation and desperation in the typical urban dwelling.
A Street in Bronzeville also echoes the mores of her Chicago community and other urban cities and the challenge to live the straight and narrow and not yield to the “wild life.” These observations that Brooks witnessed from afar, as a child, are later presented graphically in her writings as an adult. In so doing, the poet uncovers the unpretentious language of the women “at the hairdresser’s” and the shadowy club life in “Queen of the Blues,” a poem in which the persona, living the fast life, also grapples for self-esteem and respect from others. Brooks is no stranger to controversy, and two poems included in A Street in Bronzeville certainly confirm that reputation. The poem “the mother” is among the most controversial of Brooks’s poems. The poem covers the subject of abortion. Brooks, however, does not announce her feelings, pro or con. Again the poet states without judgment the case of the persona, a woman speaking to her unborn children in a voice filled with remorse and compassion but also with resolute determination and full acceptance for her decisions that are not in any way cavalier. The other poem that solicits reluctance from many readers is the “Ballad of Pearl May Lee.” In graphic detail, Brooks recounts the subdued agony and vocal outrage of Pearl May Lee, who mourns in mocking, bittersweet fashion her Black lover, whose fascination for white women results predictably in his hanging. This ballad echoes the crisis of racially motivated murders and the sordid history of the past, particularly in terms of the forbidden practice of intimate mixing of the races.
As Brooks continued to explore the larger world of writing and to fulfill her goals, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946 and was also named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She won her second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947 and continued to write literary reviews. Brooks published Annie Allen, her second volume of poetry, in 1949. By this time, Brooks’s reputation as a serious, capable writer was becoming widespread and her accomplishments more notable. Annie Allen is perhaps as comprehensively characteristic of the breadth of Brooks’s abilities as any of her lengthy collections.
Annie Allen generated exciting though mixed commentary, most of which related to the poet’s treatment of the urban life and the people in her community. While some suggested Brooks was limited artistically by her choice of subject matter, others applauded the poet’s ability to portray successfully the real life of her subjects in the city of Chicago. Actually, in Annie Allen, Brooks continues the revelations begun in A Street In Bronzeville, and she demonstrates her dedication to mastering “form” while also exercising a voice that is fresh in its delivery. The sense of honesty that permeates all her works, early and late, allows the reader to travel through known but often unacknowledged or untold cultural and social territory. A milestone in her life and career, Annie Allen reveals the commonplace while preserving, through formal presentation, significant cultural and social observations. Published by Harper and Brothers, Annie Allen was awarded Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize, a distinctive honor for Brooks and her Chicago community. In 1950, Brooks proudly accepted the Pulitzer for Annie Allen.
Annie Allen, presented basically in three parts, comprises: “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood”; “The Anniad”; and “The Womanhood.” The first section of Annie Allen, “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” is an exceptional grouping of poems that addresses in clear, accessible yet demanding language the pithy reality of growing up. This growth comes through the eyes of a young girl caught on the brink of “almost womanhood.” Annie, the persona, strives to discover herself within the boundaries of home, community, and society. Throughout the trials of childhood, Annie learns many of the lessons it takes to cope and survive in a world of added challenges. The poems cover the broad spectrum of youthful discovery. In “old relative,” for instance, Annie witnesses the dead, and she does so within the capabilities of her mind and station as a young person viewing adult issues. Likewise, in “downtown vaudeville,” the reader is provided a view of the complexity surrounding those awkward “reminders,” especially for Blacks in the larger society, of the continuing need for awareness of the worth and value of being Black—in terms of human dignity.
The second section of Annie Allen centers on “The Anniad,” an assortment of poems that echoes and highlights the continuing quest for “clarification” in an emerging adult world of promises and obstacles common to those who lived on the South Side. In these poems, everyday occurrences are recognized and presented in substantive contexts. In presenting an examination of life for those fully embracing or merely adjusting to living, Brooks addresses insightfully the matters of birth, marriage, and death, not necessarily in that order.
“The Womanhood” consists of views of urban life, told from varying perspectives. The poems are diverse in subject matter and powerful in diction and conviction. Brooks continues to explore the unadorned life of determined, seasoned inhabitants in situations often requiring vigilant struggle for survival and adaptation to the demands of urban life, particularly among the diverse racial populations in Chicago. This mix of cultures in Chicago is captured succinctly in “I love those little booths at benvenuti’s.” The poems range from issues related to “the children of the poor” and matters highlighting the defensive mode of daily life in “first fight. then fiddle.” In “beauty shoppe” Brooks provides the reader with a revealing glimpse into the mind-set of Blacks, urban and rural. The women in “facial,” “manicure,” and “shampoo-press-hot-oil-&-croquignole,” the three poems that comprise “beauty shoppe,” demonstrate powerful use of language, in this case, the idioms of black speech. Beneath the casual tone of the language rests Brooks’s serious message that people have difficulty accepting who they are, their natural attributes. Brooks is already proclaiming, “Black Is Beautiful,” the slogan that would become popular during the turbulent 1960s.
The poems in “The Womanhood” also assert Brooks’s diversity. In this regard, there are poems that seem to echo Brooks’s acknowledged interest in Emily Dickinson. These include “a light and diplomatic bird,” “and if sun comes,” and “Exhaust the little moment.” The trained reader recognizes in the Brooks poems the similarity in uniqueness of phrasing and austere sensibility so often associated with the poetry of Dickinson. This similarity echoes Brooks’s appreciation of Dickinson as well as Brooks’s independent spirit and devotion to her own artistic inclinations. These poems also demonstrate that Brooks could write about the world as well as she could about Chicago, as noted by many and eloquently voiced early on by Paul Engle. In one of the first and most meaningful reviews of Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville, Engle observed what is also applicable to Annie Allen: “The finest praise that can be given the book is that it would be a superb volume of poetry in any year by any person of any color. This is the kind of writing we need in this time.”
On the whole, in sonnet-laden Annie Allen, Brooks skillfully preserves the authenticity of her subjects. In poems from the section “The Womanhood,” Brooks pays tribute to the people of the earth. She does so in the year 1949, a season of critical urgency for the future of Blacks in Chicago and in America. The poet opens this section with “the children of the poor.” In the first two lines to this sonnet, she asks: “What shall I give my children? Who are poor / Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land …?” Annie Allen addresses community life of neighbors in touch with each other and with each other’s conditions, including the sufferings and the celebrations. Her view of Chicago translates to the world, where the poet becomes visionary in her anticipation of the struggles of the 1950s and the daunting 1960s. In the poem “old laughter,” the lines” The bamboo and the cinnamon / Are sad in Africa” intimate the ongoing struggles in Africa, a land that became increasingly important to Brooks and others in the decades that followed the publication of Annie Allen. In this light, the essence of Brooks’s early works provides relevance to the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s, the 1960s, and beyond.
Chicago remained a proud focus of Brooks’s writings. Two years after her second child, Nora, was born, her novel Maud Martha was published in 1953. The novel is an entertaining and engrossing yet loosely constructed account of urban life, representative of the experiences of the writer. It portrays in an essential way the subtleties of “Negro” life at a time when the color line within the race and other demarcations such as job status and parental heritage held a stronghold on the possibilities of freedom within one’s home and the larger community. The subject matter is comprehensive, from personal relationships to the color line within the Black community. The probing novel also uncovers hidden layers of devastating effects of the color line’s endangering reaches into America at large. Brooks honestly and courageously explores this territory and comments on the social implications of the position of women, particularly women of color. Maud Martha is a daring book, coming at a time before society at large was willing to discuss the prevalent issues of race, gender, and socioeconomic equality. A careful reading of Maud Martha reveals one of the earliest discussions on the color line in America, which W. E. B. DuBois said would plague the twentieth century. Gwendolyn Brooks lived the experiences she wrote about, and her personal experiences informed the progression and focus of her works.
In reading Maud Martha, the reader travels through the daily affairs of Maud, a Black woman confronting the harsh realities of her life. Unique in its format and renderings, the novel explores the human motivations apparent and not so apparent in societal affairs and accentuates the search for self-esteem. Although significant in its original presentation, its probing revelations, and its universal assessments, in many ways the novel remains a neglected manifesto on Black reality in the United States. Brooks is known primarily as a poet, not as a novelist, and few know of her interest in writing stories of her life in Chicago. Nevertheless, Maud Martha offers a realistic portrayal of tenement life and the larger community. It draws on the lives of people who struggle daily and who, for the most part, ultimately survive in their search for validation.
Loosely autobiographical, Maud Martha is clever in its design, employing a series of brief scenarios to tell Maud’s story. Maud, in fact, becomes the embodiment of an individual’s search for identity and validation. The simple structure of Maud Martha belies its thematic complexities: raw portrayals of love and death, the advent of racial and interracial prejudice, and the struggle for intellectual independence. The mere titles of the vignettes underscore the visceral and psychological issues relevant to the times. In Section Four, the understated title “Death of Grandmother” augments the reader’s sense of the narrative and confessional connection of the event to Brooks’s own life, her personal and communal reverence for the power of life and community. Similarly, “We’re the Only Colored People Here” exposes the awkwardness of race relations publicly, and the failure of so-called integration to ameliorate confused and confusing relations. In this brief episode and in “The Self-Solace,” the author portrays the anger and ambivalence that prevent meaningful cooperation. Furthermore, “The Self-Solace” explores, with rare and daring scrutiny, the lasting sting of pejorative language that emerges, consciously or otherwise, from social isolation and subjection.
As evident in Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), Brooks’s concern for future generations is another major motif in her works. This brief collection of poems highlights Brooks’s mastery of the compelling voices and minds of young black children, and addresses childhood experiences related to issues of image and esteem. Brooks speaks through the characters, who remain positive in outlook and carry the optimism Brooks held for all young people. This hopeful concern for the young remained central to Brooks’s creative spirit and commitment, and this collection advances a “youthful optimism,” to which many of her later works attest. In fact, Brooks uses children’s names as titles for poems again thirty-five years later in Children Coming Home. The use of the names not only allows the reader to see the children as living characters, but also it allows the reader to witness the writer’s compassion for and devotion to the children as people and poetic spirits themselves with moving voices of their own. Brooks creates and caresses these precious works of art, innocent and youthful, and at the same time she chronicles the realities many young individuals face in a South Side Chicago world where, unfortunately, they cannot control or even meaningfully divert their lives from a system of low expectations and achievement. Still, as is common in Brooks’s life and artistic aesthetic, she writes for them and speaks as them so that the voices blend with hers and receive the strength of support they deserve.
As a Chicagoan, Brooks continued her portrayal of Black life in Chicago and its connection to the South. The Bean Eaters (1960) opens with a poem of dedication to David Anderson Brooks, the poet’s father, who had died in 1959. This collection, appearing at the beginning of one of the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century, foretells the transformations of the coming years. Brooks would increasingly seek out controversial issues and subject matter outside the poetic boundaries of contemporary white literature. This volume contains some of the more popular poems by the author: “The Bean Eaters” and, perhaps her most anthologized poem, “We Real Cool.”
Also included in The Bean Eaters are other poems that address the culturally historical connection between the City of Chicago and the State of Mississippi. After more than a century of Black migratory connections between the two geographical regions, Brooks recounts, at a critical point in U.S. history, the sordid social and cultural interrelationship that connected the people of color in the South and those in the more northern Midwest. The poems “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” and “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” are some of the author’s most compelling works related to the Civil Rights struggles and mayhem of the 1950s. These two poems address unabashedly the horrible ills of an American society gone mad with unlearned lessons from the past and a continuing imbalance of justice and freedom for all citizens. These poems point to the teeming issues of race that served as precursors to the modern Civil Rights Movement that would last through the 1960s and beyond. Chicago has had its share of uprisings, and these continue to influence the cultural milieu of the city.
Perhaps, however, the most telling of accounts of people of color in a hostile land is the story of one of America’s most brutal chapters in history; it is the story of Emmett Till. In “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” Brooks uses soft strokes of diction to assert one of America’s greatest tragedies: the murder of a naive fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago who was spending the summer in Mississippi, and who was accused of whistling at a white woman. The brutal torture, murder, and mutilation of this young boy visiting the south frame the poem, whose message still permeates the national conscience.
In 1963, Selected Poems, perhaps the most widely distributed of the author’s collections, was published by Harper and Row. It was largely appreciated by college students and avid followers of Brooks for including many “favorites” among Brooks enthusiasts, such as poems from A Street in Bronzeville, “Negro Hero,” and a section titled “New Poems,” including “Of Robert Frost” and “Langston Hughes.” During this time, the early 1960s, Brooks was also involved in college and university teaching. She conducted workshops at Columbia College in Chicago and taught classes at, among others, Elmhurst College, City College of New York, Northeastern Illinois State College, Columbia University, and the University of Wisconsin. A year later, in 1964, Brooks received her first honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Columbia College. She would go on to receive more than seventy-five honorary degrees from various colleges and universities worldwide.
In the late 1960s, during the critical stages of the Black revolution in America, Brooks would rise to the occasion. To many college students and other writers and activists, Brooks became an established literary voice who added to the legitimacy of a cadre of young Black writers speaking in rebellion at a turbulent time when the social, cultural, and intellectual activities demanded urgent responses across the United States, particularly in Chicago. Brooks is known to have given credit to the young Black writers for engaging her “consciousness.” While this may be true, a careful reading of Brooks’s earlier works evidences a preexisting “consciousness” akin to the later “transformation” that is often evidenced by Brooks herself and acknowledged by others. It is safe to say, nevertheless, that a stronger vocalization of “Blackness” can be seen in the works of Brooks after her participation at the Fisk University Second Black Writers’ Conference in 1967. It was here that the writers spoke from a Black Aesthetic that was becoming the mantra for black writers and artists across America, with the Chicago area as one of the focal regions. Brooks was already seen as an influential figure in both the black and white literary communities. Over time, however, it became increasingly clear that she viewed her kinship to the black community as paramount, and this allegiance would have lasting influence on the focus of her writing.
Living in Chicago, Brooks remained a part of her community, and, as such, she waged a relentless campaign to educate the young writers in the city she loved. She participated in activities sponsored by Chicago’s Organization of Black American Culture, and she connected with and assisted, intellectually and financially, many writers in Chicago and elsewhere, as she traveled around the United States. In her home city, she enjoyed the support not only of the upand-coming writers of the time such as Haki Madhubuti (then Don L. Lee) but also the respect of established figures such as, among others, Hoyt Fuller, writer and editor; Lerone Bennett, prolific scholar and writer; Val Gray Ward, actress; and Larry Neal, poet and critic. Brooks was seen as the accomplished voice of wisdom and experience as Brooks and other writers, who gravitated toward her and who participated in the many workshops held in the black Chicago communities, reached consensus on their duty as Black writers.
In 1968, Gwendolyn Brooks’s long literary journey reached a peak when she was named Poet Laureate of Illinois. In the same year, she published In the Mecca. This collection came at the height of Brooks’s more noticeable immersion in “things black.” It was a time of self-awareness and cultural appreciation in the Black community, and Brooks was eager to be a viable part of the movement in which she believed and to which she became more visibly committed. Essentially, In the Mecca chronicles life in the historic Mecca Building in its days of decline from showplace to slum tenement. The Mecca building is typical of countless other buildings in cities throughout the United States. Most will agree, however, that the larger cities experienced a more pronounced version of such phenomena of buildings and neighborhoods abandoned after decades of having served the middle class well. Poverty-level replacements moved in and dealt the best they could with their literal and figurative marginalization—economic, social, and cultural. Life in Chicago provided Brooks with endless provocation and inspiration to tell the stories of those individuals and collective citizens of color living under varied and long-standing questionable conditions. At the same time, Brooks celebrates these individuals’ resolve to respond honestly and to survive bravely. In the Mecca, issued by Harper and Row, was to become Brooks’s last collection of new poems by a major white publisher.
After her ascension to poet laureate, Brooks, who always believed in “sharing the wealth,” continued her long-standing supportive relationship with the young people in her community. She was convinced that they needed to know and appreciate their heritage. To this end, she sponsored trips to Africa for several youths from her block on the South Side of Chicago. Her humanitarian inclinations did not stop there. In 1969, she began the Annual Poet Laureate Awards, held at the University of Chicago. Each year she invited, at her own considerable expense, elementary and high-school poets from across Illinois. She awarded each poet a monetary award of at least fifty dollars. In addition, it was not unusual for Brooks to award even higher monetary awards, usually five hundred dollars, to adult poets from Illinois and other states to which she had traveled. Furthermore, it was not uncommon for Brooks to pause during her reading, wherever she was, and announce monetary awards to poets she had met during her visits to high schools, colleges, campuses, and community centers across the United States.
By 1969, when her book Riot was published by Broadside Press, Brooks had decided to use only Black publishers, and this decision reflected her resolve to support the concept that being black was as positive as being white. It was a major decision requiring extraordinary courage and devotion. Brooks, nevertheless, took the leap and, once she had taken it, she made good on her word. Riot addresses all the mixed emotions of everyone involved in the act of rioting—those rioting and the sometimes outsiders who are perceived as the causes of the rioting. The book, in three parts, focuses on the human and inhuman responses to the upheaval following the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Firmly grounded in historical time and feeling, the volume nonetheless expresses ideas of loss, anguish, anger, and resolve in the voices of characters whose language and points of view make the volume a riveting and instructional read.
Riot is dedicated to Dudley Randall, the owner of Broadside Press. A longtime friend, Randall eventually published a number of Brooks’s works. Riot is historically significant in that it chronicles the climate of the 1960s and the turbulence and unrest particularly in black urban neighborhoods. Brooks was witness to the chaos in her city and in other cities across the United States, and she generated in this small collection moving and insightful poems, including the title poem “Riot” and “The Third Sermon on the Warpland.” “Riot” highlights the necessary sociopolitical connection between Brooks and all the constituents within her neighborhood and community. In this poem, Brooks depicts the prelude to a new stage of activist response in “The Young Men Run” and “The Law Comes Sirening across the Town.” Subsequently, the community pivoted to a time when “the poor were sweaty and unpretty” and “were black and loud. /And not detainable. And not discreet.” Charting the arc of outrage, Brooks closes Riot using the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Through her works, Brooks provided a polyvocal articulation for the disenfranchised, and a unified resolve to address grievances.
As Brooks continued to develop her intensified focus on Black Power issues and responses, she again turned her attention to the empowerment of youth in a world where they would need to be self-assured in order to survive. In the eight poems of Family Pictures (1970), Brooks continues her skillful unveiling of cultural lessons affecting both people of color and others in the community. “The Life of Lincoln West,” clear evidence of Brooks’s continued attention to the “color-line” so aptly explained in 1903 by W. E. B. DuBois, does not oversimplify her view of humanity. As in previous collections, she amplifies the social issues and causes of the Civil Rights struggle by concentrating on the “integrated” community experience and daring to explore the crudest of negative associations with blackness in social and cultural terms. In this long poem, Brooks, again, uses the child’s innocent persona to express with increasing poignancy the child’s experiences with the brutality of racism. Brooks, nonetheless, seizes the ugliness of the actions against Lincoln and turns the negativism into an opportunity for a celebration of enlightenment and acceptance, prevailing themes throughout the body of Brooks’s works. The young Lincoln in the poem is granted an emblem of lasting pride. Through the ironic twist of his assailants’ ignorance and hatred, as well as young Lincoln’s brilliant creativity and sensibilities, the young black boy learns and internalizes unadulterated love of self. Of equal importance, Brooks focuses not only on individuals but on how self-acceptance can help produce general acceptance among youth, the hope for the future, as demonstrated in “Speech to the Young. Speech to the Progress-Toward.” Dedicated to her two children, this poem is a plea as much as it is a visionary anthem of hope that not only her children but also all children will live their lives fulfilling their promise: to “Live not for The End of the Song / Live in the along” (lines 12–13). The year 1971 also proved to be rather prolific for Brooks. Besides other literary projects with which Brooks was associated, another book written for children, Aloneness, appeared, consisting of a single poem that exemplifies her nurturing spirit and her dedication to young people. Her continued focus on the subject is reminiscent of one of her mentors, Langston Hughes, who made children’s works a priority in his career as well.
Two years after Brooks decided to use only Black publishers, Harper and Row, the original publisher of her work, negotiated release of a collection of previously published poems. Thus, The World of Gwendolyn Brooks, 1971, became the poet’s final book issued by a major publisher and serves as a pivotal point in the public’s access to Brooks’s printed works. At the same time, Brooks began a schedule of more public readings and engagements after the official resolution of her relationship with Harper and Row. This separation from Harper and Row was perhaps the most dramatic and courageous decision Brooks would make in her literary career. The decision proved to be the beginning of a positive adventure; Brooks became more independent in decisions related to her literary aspirations. On the other hand, however, this break with a major publisher in some ways limited the access to the works of a poet of national renown. Brooks, nevertheless, was resolute in her willingness to undergo the sacrifices and the rewards precipitated by a decision of conscience. After 1971, her works were published by Broadside Press in Detroit and Third World Press in Chicago, as well as, from time to time, her own publishing entities: Black Position Press, Brooks Press, and The David Company.
Brooks kept Chicago as her base but continued to spread her influence. Report from Part One, 1972, an autobiography, appeared a year after Brooks’s trip to Africa in 1971. This account of the poet’s life acknowledges all the influences and associations relevant to her evolvement as an individual and as a poet. Report from Part One was perceived as less autobiographical than readers had anticipated, yet Brooks was pleased with what she offered in the book. In Part One, Brooks chronicles her early years and those people, including her parents, who influenced her choice to become a writer. Of particular interest is Brooks’s discussion of her growing affinity for Africa as a homeland and the role of the artist, particularly the artists of African ancestry. This book also includes the rather substantively revealing interview of Brooks by educator and historian Paul M. Engle. The interview valuably complements any assessment of Brooks and her writing philosophy at that point in her life. Brooks always remained generous to those with whom she had had meaningful literary and cultural contact. It is not surprising, then, that she would devote so much of her own story talking about others who made meaningful contributions to her life experiences. Essentially, Report from Part One traces the advent of Gwendolyn Brooks and, more importantly, chronicles her transformation from beginning poet to master poet. In Part One, Brooks provides a history of her work as a reviewer, her teaching experiences, and her introduction to the young black voices of the 1960s. Perhaps the most engrossing spiritual and intellectual experiences were her trips to Africa and her continual dedication to furthering the young voices that she said “influenced” her and prompted greater dedication to her less than favorably received activist posture in the white-dominated literary world.
Following the autobiography, Brooks continued with a spate of children’s books centering generally upon themes of the necessary search for a moral, ethical, and useful identity in the contemporary world frequently beset by violence and racism. The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves, or What You Are You Are (1974), is, as with most celebrated children’s books, full of messages for all ages, not just children. The story explores the universal theme of the need to search for, recognize, and embrace personal identity, developing from insecurity and denial to ultimate acceptance. This time the stories are explicitly related to African subject matter and art forms, richly portrayed through the African folk tradition of using animals in the telling of stories and skillfully illustrated by Timothy Jones. Dedicated to her children Nora Blakely and Henry Blakely III, Brooks nurtures her own biological children and those of the reading community by encouraging them to recognize, accept, and laud positive self-identity.
As a result of this focus, Brooks remained cognizant of the activities in her neighborhood and remained in touch with the people on the South Side. Beckonings (1975) builds on Brooks’s interest in issues relevant to her community and reiterates the concept of establishing and, in some instances, restoring positive self-identity, especially among young Blacks. Brooks generates hope that the young in her community and everywhere will fulfill their potential in becoming whole in a hostile or seemingly indifferent society. Her convictions and desires can be measured in her laments for those in her community. In “The Boy Died in My Alley,” the poet addresses not only the violence but also the transformation of her neighborhood from a community living in illusory accord to one rife with inherited and fresh cultural, political, social, and economic differences. Still, by claiming the alley, the speaker recognizes the responsibility of those in the community to own their streets, houses, neighbors, and lives. Brooks does not avoid the lighter side of life, the common and enjoyable experiences that people share, as in “Steam Song,” a poem centering on singer Al Green, and “Horses Graze.” “Horses Graze” focuses explicitly on horses, but, as in The Tiger, the animals’ experiences serve as a commentary on the human, the sad wasting of human capabilities. Likewise, in the poem “Boys. Black,” Brooks makes a probing, passionate appeal to black boys to “forge through the sludge” of false promises and personal miscalculations about the society in which they must live. She “beckons” to them to overcome. In another voice, Brooks announces “A Black Wedding Song,” perhaps one of the leading displays of positive interaction and reciprocation between men and women of color in works by Brooks. In this poem, the speaker calls upon the participants to reach to a place beyond mere unconscious, automatic parroting. Black people need to inform their sacred rituals with words that express themselves. Brooks closes each of the two stanzas in confirmation: “Come to Your Wedding Song,” as if a journey will discover what has been awaiting the awakened consciousness. As expected, Brooks concludes the collection with positive expectation. In this volume, the reader discovers Brooks’s love of Chicago and her devotion to promise of a better world for those she knows will come years after her.
As Brooks continued to refine her focus and her literary goals, in 1975 she also coedited, with Keorapetse Kgositsile, Haki Madhubuti, and Dudley Randall, A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing (Detroit: Broadside Press), designed to assist writers in their craft and in their literary and social consciousness. This work proved to be a harbinger for many emerging scholars of the Black Movement, who were beginning to access “the movement” and its impact on American culture, at a time when the prevailing cultural and political energy in America had grown more conservative. Brooks also seized this publishing opportunity to echo her concern that poetry should not be nor appear “too studied,” a term she liked to use to describe even some of her own early poems. Rather, for Brooks, a feeling of improvisation, spontaneity, and cooperation leading to excitement and evocation of the spirit directly related to African communal practices, helps to express the energy of humanity. In this practice she attempted to explain and champion the creation of Black literature by rooting it in African communal aesthetics, which in turn made literature, especially poetry, relevant to “average” people, particularly those of color. Through this, the work motivated cycles of creativity and action that were interactive and affirmative.
Brooks increased her speaking engagements across the United States, but her family remained her foremost priority. In 1976, Brooks lost her brother, Raymond Brooks, and in 1978, Keziah Brooks, her mother, also died. This was a critical time in the poet’s life. It is, therefore, understandable that Brooks did not publish another volume until Primer for Blacks in 1980. The poems “Primer for Blacks,” “To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals,” and “Requiem before Revival” that comprise Primer for Blacks all echo Brooks’s long-standing determination to move as many as possible of her people to a point of pride and self-determination. She felt that she had much to say and offer during this waning period of the Black Pride Movement that had risen to prominence in the late 1960s. This thin volume offers enduring moments of encouragement to beginning writers of any age or race. In “Primer for Blacks,” the poet uses the symbol and essence of “Blackness” to connect American Blacks with the universe of Blacks. “To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals” echoes Brooks’s sustaining appreciation of the steadfast warriors who remained relentless, who kept their natural hair, and who had “not wanted to be white.” The poem salutes Black pride, a staple in all of Brooks’s poems related to daily life in her native Chicago and elsewhere.
Brooks was ever the generous benefactor and mentor.
She was noted for her impressive impromptu literary awards to deserving students and for her advice to the writers she met. Brooks often wrote letters to many young, aspiring writers and other individuals she met during her travels. Thus it is understandable that, in 1980, she would publish Young Poet’s Primer, a poetic text of guidelines for young writers. The thin volume provides, in accessible language to the young, poetic insights to the art of human expression. In similar fashion to Young Poet’s Primer, another volume for budding poets, Very Young Poets, was published in 1983. Brooks remained current in her views and quite aware of the social and cultural shifts of the day. Being informed on gender issues, she also was aware of the many challenges young children faced in their daily lives. In Very Young Poets, for instance, Brooks’s poem “Computer” reminds the young: “I conduct a computer / A computer does not conduct me” (27). These two volumes sustained Brooks’s willingness to invest her dreams in the nurturing of the young people in Chicago and around the world.
In terms of her extending her fame, a year after her trip to the Soviet Union, Brooks published To Disembark (1981). The collection comprises previously published poems, including “In Memoriam: Edgar William Blakely,” “Family Picture,” “To Prisoners,” and “To Disembark.” The poems highlight Brooks’s relentless desire to uplift the downtrodden and the disenfranchised, but with a nuance of focus as a nod to her recent international travel. In the poem “To Prisoners,” Brooks appeals to the prisoners to put forth diligent efforts, which result in a sense of decorum that contributes to their survival. To a greater extent, Brooks takes a more pronounced stance in presenting her concerns in a global context, outside the urban setting and beyond Chicago. To Disembark is a collection that crystallizes the significance of the African Diaspora through its international context, prompting a continued focus among informed scholars and intellectuals of color, and reinforcing this as an essential characteristic of African American Studies departments. The connection of American Blacks to African culture was vital to any affirmation of positive self-identity, and Brooks remained a part of this growing crusade. To Disembark is, as she says in “In Memoriam: Edgar William Blakely,” a plea for all to “ … Be sane. Be / Neighbor to all people in the world.” Neighbor, community, country, and world.
Remaining reliably attuned to current events, Brooks especially kept abreast of the events in her culturally enriching Chicago. In 1983, Brooks, having published Very Young Poets, continued to inspire as many young writers as possible and still fulfill her official responsibilities as the Poet Laureate of Illinois and a major literary voice of Chicago. Therefore, in 1983, Brooks also published the salutary Mayor Harold Washington and Chicago, the I Will City. This tribute to the first Black mayor of Chicago comprises three distinct poems: “Mayor Harold Washington,” “Chicago, the I Will City,” and “A Hymn to Chicago.” The energy that drives this tribute is rooted in the long history of Chicago as a political lightning rod in American politics. Chicago, long known as one of the most segregated cities in America, finally elected a Black mayor in 1983. Brooks, who was an active supporter, wrote this volume in honor of Harold Washington. Brooks found Washington’s election just cause for celebration, signaling a redemptive moment for the people of Chicago who had moved a great distance from old politics. More importantly, Brooks recognized and celebrated this achievement as a worthy triumph for people of African descent in the City of Chicago and as an emblem of pride for Blacks across the nation. The poet’s inclusion of “A Hymn to Chicago” in this volume echoes the long-standing concerns that helped to drive the efforts of Brooks in correcting inequities and injustices for the good of all involved on all sides of any concern related to making real the “promises of democracy” in Chicago and for all Americans.
Brooks’s views on humanity are evidenced through her apparent appreciation of individual awareness and social responsibility in a universe of constant social, cultural, and political change. In The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986), Brooks’s international perspective sits beside local Chicago matters in a seamless blend of Pan-African social awareness and responsibility. Where “The Near-Johannesburg Boy” and “In Nairobi” explore world matters, Brooks also includes previously published poems that entail life in the Chicago region and across America, cleverly uniting the essence of African struggles with those of Blacks in America. “Early Death: ‘Of the Young Dead;’” and “To the Young Who Want to Die” reiterate Brooks’s long-standing appreciation of the challenges presented to young and older members of Black communities. In “The Chicago Picasso,” Brooks, as Illinois Poet Laureate and one of Chicago’s leading literary figures, addresses the power and broad appeal of modern art through her reference to Picasso, a towering figure whose use of “primitive” African masks and aesthetics helped him revolutionize art around the world. “The Chicago Picasso” ironically reclaims the tradition and greatness that has been associated with that artist. The poem demonstrates Brooks’s ability to function effectively in relation to different strands of the social fabric, but with a principled vision. In addition, with the inclusion of the memorably ironic poem “Infirm,” the collection becomes a tribute to universal acknowledgment of human equality and dignity. The closing poem “Infirm” echoes the need to recognize the larger commonalities connecting all members of the human race. Overall, the poems in The Near-Johannesburg Boy, “dedicated to the students of Gwendolyn Brooks Junior High School, Harvey, Illinois,” demonstrate Brooks’s commitment to recognizing a common humanity.
The breadth and wealth of Brooks’s literary contributions is made clear through the body of her literary offerings, and this is quite noticeable in her impressive collection Blacks (1987). Through this seminal collection by Brooks, consisting of a representative sampling of the poet’s works—A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, The Bean Eaters, In the Mecca, Riot, Maud Martha (novel), and excerpts from Primer for Blacks, Beckonings, To Disembark, and The Near-Johannesburg Boy—these works were assured due prominence among scholars and other Brooks enthusiasts. It is a comprehensive collection for many who otherwise would not have convenient access to works by Brooks. In this edition, new and longtime readers encounter a tenacious Brooks preferring the term “Black” to any others in the long-standing quarrel over preferred terms for people of color, including but not limited to “colored,” “black,” “Negro,” “Afro-American,” and “African American.” Brooks preferred the all-inclusive term “Black” because she felt the term included people of color everywhere. Black is less literally a deterministic color than it is a proactive and empowering manner of dealing with a world frequently bent on outright control and manipulation of its perceived threatening differences.
Blacks is the closest thing to a definitive collection of Brooks’s works, coming at a time, in 1987, when the poet began to enlarge earlier themes and to add new ones. The collection presents 512 pages of challenge, struggle, and triumph. The writings are spiritually and intellectually integrated to quintessential accuracy in accounting the many nuances that continue to shape the black search for the Pan-African (American) dream and universal freedom. Blacks embodies the growing stature and the poetic life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Equally important, as indicated earlier, the collection sustains the understanding that Brooks was always intellectually concerned and involved with all people of color and, in fact, echoed many of the themes that younger poets, years later, would come to announce more loudly as the mantra during the days of the turbulent years of civil unrest and cultural revolution, primarily during the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Blacks, then, represents a substantive portion of the career of one of America’s most lauded poets, expressing her long-standing awareness of the engrained issues facing people of color, Americans more broadly, and brethren around the world.
Following up Blacks, Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle (1988) comprises four poems: “Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle,” “Winnie,” “Thinking of Elizabeth Steinberg,” and “Michael, Young Russia.” This collection reflects, as clearly as her other later collections, Brooks’s ability to express in an international context the nuances of black involvement not only in the black world but in the white one as well. “Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle” provides a history lesson on the customary misappropriation of the wealth—gifts and talents—of blacks by some whites. The scathing, satirical poem uses Gottschalk, U.S. pianist and composer, to highlight the genius of African American music and to call attention to America’s fascination with the power and influence of this universally recognized genius, but interestingly employs “European” terms in the title to emphasize how European music is not “a white thing” and how knowledge should not be avoided under any circumstances. It may lead one back to oneself. On the other hand, in “Thinking of Elizabeth Steinberg,” Brooks demonstrates her compassion and dread at the death of any child, closing Gottschalk with the moving salute, again to the young—but this time to “Michael, Young Russia.” These poems go a long way in dispelling the frequently cited notion that Brooks was totally indifferent to the plight of people other than those of her race. The long poem “Winnie,” first published in the 75th Anniversary issue of Poetry, also appears in this collection. In 1988, Brooks published Winnie, dedicated to her daughter Nora Blakely and focusing on Winnie Mandela, as a separate publication. Winnie confirms Brooks’s devotion to world issues and to championing heroic people, whoever and wherever they are. For Brooks, Blackness does that.
Brooks remained optimistic as she focused on the childhood of the innocent young and the childhood experiences in urban settings. Children Coming Home, 1991, written about children, focuses on the plight of children and also posits the importance of adults properly engaging and nourishing not only their young but also all of the young people within their care and influence. Fittingly, Brooks opens the book with a quote from poet Mari Evans: “Speak the truth to the people.” Accordingly, Children Coming Home is a realistic portrayal of the life issues of children and consists of poems bearing children’s names and corresponding titles. Brooks uses this array of names and children to present a cross section of the issues affecting America’s children. The children include, among others, Tinsel Marie, Kojo, and Nora. In “The Coora Flower,” Tinsel Marie is in a household where her mother is on drugs, and Tinsel Marie has to sleep uneasily because there might be a strange man in the house. Brooks makes it clear that she is a delicate flower in need of protection and whose nurturing has been neglected by a mother who is caught in a cycle of sex and drugs that unfortunately too often overwhelms and destroys young women. In contrast to The Coora Flower,” “Kojo: I Am A Black” features Kojo, who is negotiating the world of racial politics by advocating for his own sense of the world, wanting to be called “Black,” not “African-American.” Articulating Brooks’s preference to use “Black” for race identification, Kojo still comes from an environment where, like Tinsel Marie, he faces forces that attempt to limit and define him, requiring increased strength and endurance to survive and prevail. Nora, the persona in “I’ll Stay” speaks to the ambitions of a child fulfilling her dreams of success wherever she happens to be living. The poem is oddly reminiscent of Brooks’s own desire “to stay” in her neighborhood despite the shifting demographics and declining sense of community occurring in her later years. Reluctantly, Brooks had to move, eventually, from her old neighborhood to a safer environment on South Shore Drive.
In Children Coming Home, Brooks remains current with the issues of the times, and she establishes in a unique way the authentic presentation of the life of those she portrays. Each poem delicately translates the emotions of each child. Annye L. Refoe observes: “The uniqueness of this volume lies in the tone that each poem assumes. The inhibitions that accompany adults are usually absent in children; therefore, what is stated and attributed to the children is exactly what is on ‘their’ minds without embellishment or self-pity.” Coming late in Brooks’s life, Children Coming Home is a lasting presentation of all the fervor that went into Brooks’s earlier books for children: Bronzeville Boys and Girls and Aloneness. In Children Coming Home, however, Brooks covers every subject of conversation and most of the unspoken challenges faced by the youth of today. With this volume, Brooks steps into the modern age with graceful scrutiny and steadfast alertness. Brooks manages to cover the compelling issues facing the young, and the book becomes an appeal to save all children without the maudlin sentimentality that usually accompanies this subject.
It is auspicious that Children Coming Home is the last collection Brooks published while she was alive. This collection provides one of the broadest spectrums of Brooks’s vision and talent. The collection further evidences Brooks’s ability to adapt to the times while not losing her enthusiasm for life. She nurtured the uncanny ability to remain interested in new things and new ways of expressing old ideas and concepts, and she kept a balanced view of modern culture, including television, movies, and contemporary music. She was a strong supporter of spoken word poetry and selective rap. Brooks liked children as well as poets, young and old, who brought freshness to the universe of ideas, formal and informal. Likewise, due in large part to her Chicago savvy and her world exposure, she embraced a range of literary expression and remained dedicated to encouraging new voices in poetry. And she always came home.
In writing and speaking of herself, Brooks was reserved yet honest and forthright: she measured her revelations in conversation and in print. Report from Part Two, the second part of the autobiography of Gwendolyn Brooks, published in 1996, is more a record, a report, than a full autobiography, as many have cited. In Part Two, Brooks continues where Report from Part One closed. Brooks affirms her relationships with those who remained faithful through the years and acknowledges her associations with those who, casually or otherwise, made a lasting difference in her life. The sketches she re-creates are revealing and memorable. The details of her travels to Africa and other events, personal and public, unveil the full dimension of Brooks as a humane individual. The book also includes the sentimental. She devotes a chapter “Keziah” to her mother, Keziah Brooks, who remained a life-force in the poet’s life and greatly influenced the poet’s sensibilities. Another chapter of import is “The Day of the Gwendolyn,” which recounts Brooks’s role as 1985–86 Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the title “Poet Laureate” was legislated the following year). Building on the familiar practices of her life in Chicago communities and elsewhere, Brooks continued to reach out to “the people” on all stations of life. Brooks brought to this office the enviable notion that the position of Consultant in Poetry should be one of activity and involvement. Brooks clearly produced one of the earliest, most active and inclusive tenures as Consultant in Poetry and helped to establish the tradition of an interactive poet laureate.
Part Two becomes for Brooks a celebration of her life and remains an informative survey of incidents, people, and personalities deserving of her commentary. It provides insight to her gracious nature as she seizes opportunity to demonstrate her appreciation for friends and acquaintances at a late stage in her life, including many famous contemporaries. During her introductions of writers she invited to read at The Library of Congress, she offers insight on two respected colleagues: poet Donald Hall, whom she identified as having courage and conviction, and William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies. While there are times when students and scholars can have a tendency to isolate Black artists from white, Brooks clearly took her place among black and white writers of her time. The final section, “I’m Here!,” fittingly complements Brooks’s benevolence. In this closing section, the poet acknowledges those who remained spiritually and intellectually faithful. Foremost among these is her longtime manager and friend, Beryl Zitch of The Contemporary Forum. It was through Zitch’s office that America could contact Brooks, Poet Laureate of Illinois. Essentially, Part Two remains a memorable and enlightening self-assessment by the author.
In Montgomery: And Other Poems (2003) is the first volume of Brooks’s poetry published after her death—on December 3, 2000, at her home in Chicago. The collection includes “In Montgomery,” which resulted from an assignment arranged by Ebony’s Executive Editor, Herbert Nipson, and first appeared in Ebony Magazine (August, 1971). “In Montgomery,” a poem of over six hundred lines, addresses the racial climate in Montgomery during the seminal years of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South. The other poems include, among others, previously published “Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle,” “Winnie,” “Song of Winnie,” “Thinking of Elizabeth Steinberg,” “Michael, ‘Young Russia,’” and “Jane Addams.” It is clear to those who followed the career of Brooks that she was always writing and had plans for many other works. This collection is a lasting reminder of how much more the readers need to see the yet unpublished works of this author, one of America’s most highly venerated poets.
Gwendolyn Brooks came to the end of her career as she began it—with accolades. She garnered a list of many “First Achievements,” including the first black recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, 1950; an invitation from President John F. Kennedy to read at a Library of Congress Poetry Festival in 1962; the first Black Poet Laureate of Illinois, 1968–2000; the first to receive an Honorary Doctorate from Western Illinois University, 1971; the first Black woman to serve as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (Poet Laureate of the United States), 1985–86; and recipient of the Society for Literature Award, University of Thessaloniki, Athens, Greece. Her other honors include being named the 1994 Jefferson Lecturer for The National Endowment for the Humanities, the highest Federal Government Intellectual Achievement Honor, and the 1999 Academy of American Poets Sixty-Fifth Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement and election by the Academy’s Board of Chancellors. In addition, the Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center at Western Illinois University and the Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center for Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University honor the legacy of Brooks. Although the Brooks Center at Chicago State serves as a repository of the poet’s works, her personal papers are a part of the African American Writers Collection at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. There remain wide admiration for and growing scholarly interest in the literary life of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Brooks, who always wanted to be a poet, published a few poems as a child. Her first book of poems, however, was A Street in Bronzeville (1945). Being quite inquisitive, she grew up pondering the issues of her time: talent, race, and culture. In her writings and interviews, it is clear that she preferred the term “Black.” She found it inclusive and fully embracing. This concept is nowhere more apparent than in “Kojo: I Am A Black,” the poem in Children Coming Home, in which Kojo says:
I am a Black and a Black forever.
…………………………………….
I am other than hyphenation.
…………………………………….
Do not call me out of my name.
Brooks gave a voice to the multitude of the disenfranchised in her “native” city of Chicago, but she became and remains a voice for people of color everywhere and certainly an equally qualified voice for all those who love humanity and know of its promise. Thus, it is understandable that in closing “Requiem before Revival” in Primer for Blacks, Gwendolyn Brooks says:
I continue my old optimism. In spite of all the disappointment and disillusionment and befuddlement out there, I go on believing that the Weak among us will, finally, perceive the impressiveness of our numbers, perceive the quality and legitimacy of our essence, and take sufficient, indicated steps toward definition, clarification.
Brooks remained steadfast in her convictions and was noted for her integrity as an individual and as an artist.
One of the long-standing concerns about Brooks’s career as a writer is the scarcity of access to her works in printed form. What is more redeeming, however, is the awareness that Brooks, wherever she appeared, with her exceptional voice and unfaltering energy, provided to each audience a memorable record of personal performance, delivered with intense conviction and a style, hers alone. Those who heard her will always remember the grasp and authenticity of her assertions to preserve all things living and to accentuate all things important within the arena of human endeavor and survival. Brooks remains a voice whose conscience guided her consciousness. Likewise, her poems echo, in clear and memorable tones, the challenges and aspirations of those on the South Side of Chicago as well as those other increasingly varied and troubled voices across the United States and around the world. Perhaps her spirit and character are best encapsulated in her mantra for the world in her poem “The Second Sermon on the Warpland”: “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”
Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900–1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1981.
Engle, Paul. “Chicago Can Take Pride in New, Young Voice in Poetry,” Chicago Tribune Books, August 26, 1945, 11.
Franklin, John Hope and Alfred A. Moss Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
Kufrin, Joan. “Gwendolyn Brooks.” Uncommon Women. Piscataway, N.J.: New Century Publishers,1981.
Loff, Jon N. “Gwendolyn Brooks: A Bibliography.” College Language Association Journal 17 (September 1973): 21–32.
Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987.
———. Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Interviews and Interviews. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
Mootry, Maria K. and Gary Smith. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Refoe, Annye L. “Children Coming Home: A Tribute to Survival.” Revelry: The Literary Voice of the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers Association of Florida 5 (Spring 1992): 17–21.
Shaw, Harry B. Gwendolyn Brooks. Boston: Twayne, 1980.
Spear, Allan H. Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto: 1890–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
Wright, Stephen Caldwell, ed. On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
See also Brooks entries in DLB 5: American Poets Since World War II, 1980.
DLB 76: Afro-American Writers, 1940–55, 1988.
DLB 165: American Poets Since World War II, Fourth Series, 1996.
A Street in Bronzeville. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945.
Annie Allen. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949.
Maud Martha. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953.
Bronzeville Boys and Girls. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956.
The Bean Eaters. New York: Harper and Row, 1960.
Selected Poems. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.
In the Mecca. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
Riot. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1969.
Family Pictures. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1970.
Aloneness. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1971. Children’s Book.
The World of Gwendolyn Brooks. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Report from Part One: Autobiography. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972.
The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves, or What You Are, You Are. Chicago: Third World Press, 1974.
Beckonings. Chicago: Third World Press, 1975.
Primer for Blacks. Chicago: Brooks Press, 1980.
Young Poet’s Primer. Chicago: Brooks Press, 1980.
To Disembark. Chicago: Third World Press, 1981.
Mayor Harold Washington and Chicago, the I Will City. Chicago: Brooks Press, 1983.
Very Young Poets. Chicago: Brooks Press, 1983.
The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems. Chicago: The David Company, 1986.
Blacks. Chicago: The David Company, 1987.
Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle. Chicago: The David Company, 1988.
Winnie. Chicago: The David Company, 1988.
Children Coming Home. Chicago: The David Company, 1991.
Report from Part Two: Autobiography. Chicago: Third World Press, 1996.
In Montgomery: And Other Poems. Chicago: Third World Press, 2003.