Gwendolyn Brooks

• Born: June 7, 1917
• Birthplace: Topeka, Kansas
• Died: December 3, 2000
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

Poet

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards, Brooks is known for poems that describe the daily life of the urban poor and the grim consequences of racial discrimination. She combined old and new poetic forms and inspired many readers to enjoy poetry. She also was an avid supporter of black solidarity.

Areas of achievement: Literature; Poetry; Social issues

Early Life

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917 but spent her childhood and adult life in Chicago, Illinois. Her mother, Keziah Wims Brooks, had been a teacher in Topeka. Her father, David Anderson Brooks, was the son of a runaway slave and worked as a janitor. She had two younger siblings. Both parents encouraged Brooks’s education. A precocious child, Brooks wrote plays and poems; “Eventide” was her first published poem, appearing in Childhood Magazine in 1930. Dozens of her poems were published in The Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper. To encourage her writing, Brooks’s mother arranged for her to meet the Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson.

Brooks attended mixed-race public schools—some mostly white, others mostly black—and experienced discrimination from white classmates as well as lighter-skinned black classmates. In 1936, Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior College in Chicago. She worked as a typist, including a stint typing for a faith healer in the apartment building that became the setting of her collection of poems titled In the Mecca (1968).

Among Brooks’s favorite writers were Hughes, Countée Cullen, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Edna St.Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, and Walt Whitman. She trained in poetry workshops, notably a workshop for African Americans organized by Inez Cunningham Stark. She married Henry Blakely in 1938, and they had two children: Henry Blakely, Jr., in 1940 and Nora Blakely in 1951. During the 1940’s, Brooks’s poems appeared in literary magazines such as Harper’s, Poetry, and The Saturday Review of Literature.

Life’s Work

Brooks’s early poems described the lives of residents of Chicago’s South Side ghettos, creating vivid portraits of fictional characters. Brooks detailed inner-city settings such as kitchenettes and pool halls. She emphasized the positive aspects of poor people’s lives, such as close families and resilience in hard times. She wrote about black servicemen who risked their lives overseas yet received discriminatory treatment on the home front. She documented the Civil Rights movement with poems about heroes such as Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. Her poem “Riders of the Blood-Red Wrath” honored the Freedom Riders, who integrated public transportation.

Brooks contributed to acceptance of the word “black” when a reading from “Of De Witt Williams on His Way to Lincoln Cemetery” was banned by two radio stations in 1962 because the word “black” was considered pejorative by some. Brooks defended the term’s appropriateness. The poem became the basis for a song, “Elegy for a Plain Black Boy,” by Oscar Brown, Jr.

Brooks published more than twenty books. Her most important poetry collections were A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Annie Allen (1950), The Bean Eaters (1960), Selected Poems (1963), In the Mecca, Family Pictures (1970), and In Montgomery (2000). Her prose fiction work Maud Martha was published in 1953. She received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950, becoming the first African American to win the prestigious award. In 1962, she was invited by President John F. Kennedy to read at a Library of Congress festival on poetry. She was named poet laureate of Illinois in 1968 and used the position to promote public appreciation of poetry. In 1985, she became poet laureate consultant in poetry for the Library of Congress (the position that later became national poet laureate). In 1995, Brooks received the National Medal of Arts.

In addition to her active career lecturing and conducting poetry workshops, Brooks taught at many colleges and universities, including Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin. She traveled extensively, visiting England, France, Ghana, and the Soviet Union.

In 1967, Brooks attended a conference for African American writers at Fisk University, at which she experienced an epiphany of racial consciousness. At the age of fifty, she took on a mission to advance the cause of racial justice. Her writings became more political and satirical, devoting more attention to racial discrimination and taking an angry tone. Harper had been the publisher of Brooks’s earlier works, but after 1967 she assigned her works to minority-owned publishing houses. She directed her writing toward African American readers, urging them to love their blackness. Her collection Riot (1970) reflected her Black Nationalist beliefs and depicted the anger that led to urban rioting. In 1971, Brooks launched a magazine, The Black Position.

Throughout Brooks’s career, her poems reflected the world in which she lived. She commented on South Africa’s apartheid system, war, street violence, school integration, and the assassinations of black leaders. She lamented the senseless deaths of inner city youths and the racist verdicts reached in biased courtrooms.

Brooks experienced heart problems in 1966 and 1971. Her health suffered in the succeeding decades, and she died in 2000.

Significance

Brooks excelled as a poet, activist, and nurturer. Her poems embodied African folk traditions, such as dancers swaying in rhythm, religious leaders sermonizing and prophesying, and oral historians reciting ballads of the past. She wrote in a distinctive style, often using innovative poetic forms. She wrote two books of advice for would-be writers: Young Poet’s Primer in 1981 for older students, and Very Young Poets in 1983 for children.

From the 1960’s on, Brooks’s poems took an increasingly activist tone, encouraging African Americans to fight unequal treatment. She promoted black pride and voiced the rage of urban youths trapped in ghettos and lacking opportunity. Her ultimate message was that African Americans should work together and maintain hope. Her concern went beyond African Americans to include women and poor people of all races.

Brooks also was a nurturer, not only of her own children but also of those attending her workshops and reading her poetry. She focused on aiding young people through books like Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956) and Aloneness (1971), which dealt with combating loneliness and the need to “be yourself.” Brooks took a special interest in troubled black teens; concerned about the high youth homicide rate in inner-city Chicago, she conducted a poetry workshop for members of the Blackstone Rangers street gang.

Bibliography

Adoff, Arnold, ed. The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the Twentieth Century. Introduction by Gwendolyn Brooks. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Collection of six hundred poems includes nineteen by Brooks, who also wrote the introduction.

Alexander, Elizabeth, ed. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks. New York: Library of America, 2005. Collection of Brooks’s poems compiled by an expert on black literature.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. Report from Part One: An Autobiography. Highland Park, Mich.: Broadside Press, 1972. The first of two autobiographies covers Brooks’s childhood, marriage, early publications, and the Fisk writers conference.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Report from Part Two. Chicago: Third World Press, 1996. This second part of Brooks’s autobiography contains reminiscences, biographies of other black poets, and descriptions of her overseas travel.

Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. An African American literature professor at the University of Chicago details Brooks’s life story and discusses her use of language.

Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. An admiring, detailed analysis of Brooks’s career, including a chronology of her major collections with literary analysis. Brooks read and approved the manuscript.

Mickle, Mildred R., ed. Critical Insights: Gwendolyn Brooks. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2009. An English professor presents essays about social influences on Brooks, some not previously published. Includes in-depth analysis of some of Brooks’s works and an extensive bibliography.