Introduction
Gwendolyn Brooks wrote and performed her magnificent poetry for and about the Black people of Chicago, and yet it was also read with anguish, delight, and awe by white people, successive waves of immigrants, and ultimately the world. In particular, she wrote to Black youth and she wrote about their vibrant and precarious lives and challenges, and from the first, she wrote of old-marrieds, children who did not live and who did live, children who were damaged, the men who went to church.
She wrote of being a front-yard woman, longing for a “peek at the back / where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows,” wishing she were “a bad woman, too.” Her characters are so vibrant, sorrowful, and tenacious that they linger in their steely defeats. Bronzeville becomes, in her hands, a global and universal city of human anguish, social dis-investment, and community life/resilience.
Ms. Brooks swam into our view during the late ’60s, when the Black Arts Movement of young Chicago poets began publishing their work as broadsides and one-dollar pamphlets at Broadside Press in Detroit and Third World Press in Chicago: Carolyn Rodgers, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Don L. Lee, Etheridge Knight, Dudley Randall, Eugene B. Redmond, Ethelbert Miller all paid tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks as their accomplished and generous elder. At that time of revolutionary upheaval, Ms. Brooks famously wrote: “I have hopes for myself.”2
For those who committed to attacking the structures and practices of white supremacy during this vortex, Ms. Brooks herself was a living example of a revolutionary life. She sponsored an annual poetry contest for Black youth. Once, at one of her appearances, she came onto a stage as an older woman, followed by three young men carrying brown paper shopping bags filled with her books. She said yes when someone asked if they could reprint her work for free and later gave sharp critiques of the spacing in galleys. She agreed to be the poet laureate for the Cook County Centennial of the world’s first juvenile court—a commemoration that was a plea to elevate justice for the Black child in the racist city of Chicago. She asked to be used; she made herself available.