Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

The African-American poet, novelist, and autobiographer Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, at her grandmother’s house. Soon after her birth, her parents, David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Corinne Wims Brooks, moved to Chicago, the city that became Gwendolyn Brooks’s home and source of poetic inspiration. David, a janitor and housepainter, and Keziah, a former schoolteacher, read to Gwendolyn at an early age, instilling in her a love of words and music and an appreciation for the sound of language: the rhythms and cadences she wove masterfully throughout her life as a poet and teacher.

She began writing poetry at age seven; by 13 she had published her first poem, “Eventide,” in American Childhood magazine. In addition to the support she received from her parents, she was encouraged by James Weldon Johnson, to whom she had written, and by Langston Hughes, whom she met at the Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago. After Brooks sent Johnson some of her poems, he recommended that she read modern(ist) poets like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and e. e. cummings. Hughes sight-read her poetry in person, told her she had talent, encouraged her to keep writing, and later wrote about her potential in his newspaper column. By 16 Brooks had already assembled an impressive poetry portfolio of more than 75 published poems that had appeared in Chicago Defender, a newspaper serving Chicago’s black population.

After graduating with an associate degree in literature and arts from Wilson Junior College (1936), Brooks worked as a domestic and as a secretary in several offices. Later, she drew upon these experiences in Maud Martha (1953) and In the Mecca (1968)—before she served as publicity director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP’s) Youth Council in Chicago. She married Henry Lowington Blakely II on September 17, 1939, and gave birth to two children: a son, Henry L. Blakely III (1940), and a daughter, Nora (1951). In 1941 Gwendolyn and Henry attended a poetry class at the South Side Community Arts Center, a formative experience during which she sketched many of the early poems that would make her famous.

During this time she lived in Chicago’s “kitchenette buildings,” cramped, often-unsanitary apartments that provided the setting for her first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville (1954). This first collection, named for the segregated Douglas community area on the South Side of Chicago, introduced many of the themes that would occupy Brooks for the first half of her career.

These include the search for dignity and happiness in a society often blind to such basic needs, the reality of racism and poverty in America, life in urban America, the plight of underprivileged black women, mother love, and the trauma of world war. As B. J. Bolden describes, “The compilation of forty-one poems forms a collage of racism, sexism, and classicism of America in its illumination of the people who strive to survive in Bronzeville. In the background of her portraits looms the shadow of the American struggle to come to grips with its diverse population by entrapping the Black community in a stagnant environment” (14). The collection is divided into three sections.

The first section focuses on the community of poor blacks she knew and with whom she lived. The second section consists of five portraits, including the long poem (159 lines) “Sunday of Satin-Legs Smith,” which Brooks wrote at Richard Wright’s suggestion. The third and final section is a 12-sonnet sequence titled “Gay Chaps at the Bar” based on reflections about World War II by men who fought in the war, which she dedicated to her brother, “Staff Sergeant Raymond Brooks and every other soldier.” Critics praised A Street in Bronzeville. With a national reputation and a critically acclaimed book, Brooks received a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters the following year (1946), as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship that year and then another Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947.

In 1950 Brooks received the Pulitzer Prize, the first African American to do so, for her second collection of poetry, Annie Allen (1949), which describes the life of its title character in four parts: “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” “The Anniad,” “Appendix to the Anniad,” and “The Womanhood.” Unlike A Street in Bronzeville with its vignettes and multiple-character focus, Annie Allen is a narrative in verse, often experimental, as in the “sonnet-ballads” Brooks fashions from colloquial speech and formal diction that tell of one black girl’s development and struggles with poverty and racial identity, a story of dreams deferred and the trials of tenement life. Brooks details her heroine’s birth, adolescence, search for self-understanding and love, sacrifices during time of war, betrayal, and growth into womanhood, when she emerges finally alone yet determined and self-reliant and calls out with maturity, wisdom, and hope: “Rise. / Let us combine.” [and] “Wizard a track through our own screaming weed.”

Brooks followed Annie Allen with Maud Martha (1953), a largely autobiographical novel dealing with racism, sexism, and the identity of an African-American woman before, during, and after World War II. Rounding out Brooks’s early works is The Bean Eaters (1960), a collection of poems that, although rooted in similar experiences as her previous works, explores civil rights issues, which were becoming increasingly important to Brooks, and experiments with free verse. In the collection Brooks deals with such charged issues as the integration of the Little Rock, Arkansas, school system and the lynching of 14-year- old Emmett Till. But, true to her faithfulness to Chicago, Brooks also continued to write about blacks in the North. As Arthur P Davis describes, Brooks’s works through The Bean Eaters are set in a distinct locale, Bronzeville, both a realistic and an imagined space that captures much about the northern black experience:

The scene on which Miss Brooks places her characters is always “a street in Bronzeville,” and Bronzeville is not just the Southside of Chicago.

It is also Harlem, South Philadelphia, and every other black ghetto in the North. Life in these various Bronzeville streets is seldom gay or happy or satisfying. The Bronzeville world is a world of run-down tenements, or funeral homes, or beauty parlors, of old roomers growing older without graciousness, or “cool” young hoodlums headed for trouble, of young girls having abortions. Unlike the South, it is not a place of racial violence, but in other respects it is worse than the South. It is a drab, impersonalized “corner” of the metropolitan area into which the Negro— rootless and alone—has been pushed. (CLA Journal 90-92)

Like the city dwellers in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), Brooks’s early characters are ordinary people, many of whom are ghetto dwellers entrapped by social, economic, and racial forces they can neither control nor understand. And, as with Joyce’s paralyzed Dubliners, Brooks characters ultimately fail, making choices and acting in ways, often out of fear and insecurity, that perpetuate their suffering.

During this period of Brooks’s enormously productive creative life, she also taught creative writing at numerous institutions, including Columbia College (Chicago), Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Wisconsin. While in teaching she inspired others to learn, express, and grow, she her- selfwas inspired by key African-American writers and activists when she attended the Second Black Writer’s Conference at Fisk University, where, among others, she met Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), Ron Milner, and Haki R. Madhubuti (formerly Don L. Lee).

Brooks was impressed by these key figures’ vigorous and sometimes aggressive action in pursuing social and political ends, their fight for civil rights, and their leadership in the black nationalist movement, a movement in the 1960s and early 1970s that focused on cultivating a sense of identity among people of African ancestry. With cries such as “Black Power” and “Black is beautiful,” the black nationalist leaders cultivated a sense of pride. Although the movement was complex and often controversial, it emphasized the need for the cultural, political, and economic independence of African Americans, and it called for action, all of which appealed to the politically aware and socially concerned Brooks.

Not surprisingly, her next work, In the Mecca (1968), a collection of poems largely dealing with events in a Chicago tenement building in which she worked as a young woman called “Mecca,” focused on experiences and language unique to black Americans. Here Brooks uses intricate phrasings, rhymes, shifting tones, eccentric characters, fallen black heroes Medgar Evars and Malcolm X, and a local street gang, the Blackstone Rangers. These poems describe abject poverty, argue for social equality, record tragic deaths, and lament the loss of African- American spirituality. As George Kent describes, “Gwendolyn spends little time evoking the Mecca Building, the former showplace that had become a slum and served as the setting for her framework and related stories.

She focuses instead upon what is happening to the holiness of people’s souls in a corrupting universe” (211-212). For Muslims, Mecca signifies paradise, heaven on earth. Thus, the title of the collection, which depicted a tenement about as far from heaven on earth as could be imagined, also enshrined the beauty and sacredness of black culture. In 1968 Brooks succeeded Carl Sandburg as the poet laureate of Illinois, a position she held until her death in 2000. She used this position to encourage young writers and fight for the black cause.

Influenced by activists and young African-American voices as well as becoming increasingly attuned to the civil rights struggle, Brooks continued writing about the black experience. But to say that she wrote explicitly about the African-American plight later in her career misses the point that her subject had always been the black experience. Her next collection, Riot (1969), was written during and inspired by the chaotic, incendiary riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

This collection also marked her move to Broadside Press, a black Detroit press operated by Dudley Randall, a close friend. Brooks continued in this vein, publishing over 20 works and writing children’s books, an autobiography in two parts, advice to young poets, and even a collection of poems, the Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986), dealing with apartheid in South Africa.

From 1985 until 1986, Brooks served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. She received over 50 honorary doctoral degrees, the 1988 Essence Literary Award, was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, became the first black woman to receive the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal, and received a Senior Fellowship in Literature grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Taken together, Brooks’s poems about ordinary people produce a vivid and complex picture of America’s poor, with poverty both sign and symbol of racism and injustice. The poor are uneducated (or undereducated), victimized by racism and crime, trapped by society and their own inadequacies. The poet-narrator’s attitude toward them is one of wistful sympathy; she herself is a part of the life she describes.

“kitchenette building” (1945)

The first poem from A Street in Bronzeville, “kitchenette building,” describes life in a tenement building, where five apartments share one bathroom, and the cramped spaces and a destitute life leave little time to hope and dream. Here Brooks portrays life in the 1930s and 1940s, when those fleeing the Jim Crow South to economic freedom in the North were desperate for housing. To accommodate the population increase and to maintain a segregated Chicago, old mansions on Chicago’s South Side were transformed into tenement buildings, with large houses divided into tiny compartments. Here the dwellers face disillusionment: a journey made to freedom whose end lies in low-income, segregated housing.

What was to be a possibility for a new life becomes a return to lesser-than status in a northern city, where unspoken, unwritten ideas about segregation dictate that blacks live in squalor. The first poem in the sequence is a central one because it asks what the fate of a dream would be in this world. Would it penetrate the “onion fumes” of garbage and “fried potatoes”? This question hangs in the air like the smell of rotting garbage and grease; it is a haunting question that seems nearly impossible to answer. For the Bronzeville dwellers live in a world of limitations in which any higher aspirations must be put aside for immediate needs: “rent,” “feeding a wife,” and “satisfying a man.”

The poem’s dream appears as “white and violet,” colors that convey lightness, intransigence, and the irony of privilege and its lack in Bronzeville. As the speaker, in this case the collective “we” voice of the Bronzeville dwellers, wonders whether a dream could take flight or even sing to those who may or may not be able to entertain a message the dream might carry, a terse response follows: “We wonder.” But this moment of reveille is short-lived, engulfed by the stark realities of the tenement building, which press upon all who dwell there and confine their sense of hope to life’s basic needs, those things, like lukewarm water, that still necessitate patience, resignation.

This portrait of urban city life, while forming a bitter social commentary and capturing the poignancy of dashed dreams, still shows human beings making their way in a world of unfathomable odds, a people determined to survive. Regardless of the way we read the poem, “kitchenette building” records the plight of urban black life prior to the civil rights era. This poem enshrines that time when hope for a future is deferred by the reality of the present, a time when “freedom” was defined according to a set of social precepts dictated by a dominant white culture, which, despite its postwar prosperity and ability to live the American dream, literally has not made space for black America.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Locate Richard Wright’s documentary book 12 Million Black Voices (1941), which contains descriptions of the plight of urban blacks after the northern migration. Note how, on pages 105-110, Wright depicts kitchenette life: “The kitchenette blights the personalities of our growing children, disorganizes them, blinds them to hope, creates problems whose effects can be traced in the characters of its child victims for years afterwards.” With this portrayal of kitchenette life in mind, compare what the two have to say about urban youth. Are their thoughts complementary, or do they form two distinctly different visions of childhood? Finally, write a well-developed essay that explores childhood in the kitchenette buildings from the perspective of each author.

2. Read Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem: A Dream Deferred” (an onlineversion can belocated athttp:// www.americanpoems.com/poets/Langston- Hughes/2381). First analyze “kitchenette building” as a response to Hughes’s poem, keeping in mind what both have to say about dreams. Next, think about setting. How are the settings of the two poems similar? With both the theme of dreams and the setting of each poem in mind, write a well-developed essay that deals with the urban black experience.

3. Read Rita Dove’s “Teach Us to Number Our Days” (1980), from her first full-length volume, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980). Explore the way both Brooks’s poem and “Teach Us to Number Our Days” deal with social inequality and dreams. After you consider what both poets have to say, write a well-developed essay on the meaning of dreams and the art of social critique in both poems.

“the mother” (1945)

“The mother” is a 35-line poem in free verse: It has no regular meter or line length and relies on natural speech rhythms and the varying of stressed and unstressed syllables. The irregular meter helps to recreate the mind of the divided mother: the agitated, unsettled mind of a woman still trying to make sense of decisions she has made. Yet Brooks does include full rhymes and some slant rhymes at the end of lines that help to unify the work and cause the last sound and image in the line to remain in the reader’s ear.

Although the poem deals with difficult subject matter, abortion, the poem is carefully crafted so that it achieves a lyrical sound. Immediately the first line assaults the reader, leaving no doubt about the poem’s subject, but the attitude that the speaker takes toward the subject is not easily discerned, for many of the lines ring with an ambiguous, often contradictory tone. In fact, the title itself is ironic; the woman speaking, although she has been pregnant, has not birthed a child, yet she implores the reader at the end of the poem, despite the difficult decisions she has made and the accompanying guilt she has expressed, to believe that she has loved all of the children she has given up.

The mother is divided: On the one hand, she affirms the decisions she has made; on the other hand, she questions those same decisions, groping for words to express the dichotomous feelings she harbors, laboring to use language to express how “the truth is to be said.” The mother’s memory and imagination link her to what she has lost, leading her to conjure the things her children might have done and to speak directly to her aborted children throughout the poem. In this way, the poem has a dreamlike quality, one in which the mother grapples with reality but also fantasizes about what might have been, creating an overall nostalgic tone that is suffused with pathos, that strange artistic quality that evokes tenderness, pity, and sorrow all at once.

As in many of the other poems in A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Brooks deals with children, the innocent who suffer in an adult world and who grapple for some place in a harsh space where they are often marginalized. Yet, despite Brooks’s interest in children and her compassion for their plight, “the mother” focuses on the consciousness of the would-be child bearer, the one who has elected not to carry children into a bleak world. The lost children stand as reminders of the harshness of the impoverished world the speaker inhabits; the mother expresses concern for those who might have been introduced into a cruel world.

Richard Wright, author of Native Son and proponent of Brooks’s poetry, read “the mother” and thought the subject inappropriate for A Street in Bronzeville. While Wright may have been correct about the climate of the times, it is difficult to imagine a more effective poem: one that breaks with our expectations and presents a portrait, drawn from the harsh reality of street life, of a divided woman. By presenting in a stark, realistic manner, a woman who has aborted her children, Brooks offers a moving depiction of the destitute urban woman.

Even though this woman regrets her actions, she keeps the lost alive in her memory, weighing what might have been, what she believes, what she knows, what she struggles with, what she has lost, and what does not make sense to her. Thus, the mother is a complex Brooks character, a woman who inhabits a difficult world, where day-to-day survival necessitates choosing from a host of real possibilities that defy any stereotype, any abstract, idealized notion of what it means to be human.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Keeping in mind that Richard Wright thought “the mother” was inappropriate for publication, evaluate Brooks’s treatment of abortion in the poem. Why might the subject matter be difficult for readers in the mid-1940s?

2. Dealing again with Wright’s objection, think about the purpose of art and evaluate Wright’s assessment of Brooks in light of his controversial novel about an enraged black man (Native Son, 1940) published several years before Brooks’s poem appeared in print. What do Wright’s and Brooks’s works have in common? What purpose does art serve for both artists? After learning about and/or reading Native Son, do you feel that Wright was being hypocritical in his critique? Why or why not?

3. Commenting on “the mother,” Brooks says, “Hardly your crowned and praised and ‘customary’ Mother; but a Mother not unfamiliar, decides that she, rather than her World, will kill her children. The decision is not nice, not simple, and the emotional consequences are neither nice nor simple” (Brooks, Report from Part One, 184). Thinking about this quote, compare Brooks’s poem about a mother who kills her children with Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a novel about a mother who kills her child rather than have it return to slavery. Why do both authors deal with these sensitive subjects?

4. Read Brooks’s two poems “People who have no children can be hard” and “What shall I give my children? who are poor,” both of which can be found in the “The Womanhood” section of Annie Allen (these two poems can also be found in Selected Poems). With these two poems and “the mother” in mind, write a well-developed essay on motherhood in Brooks’s poetry, analyzing what she says about mothers in general and about black mothers specifically.

“A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” (i960)

In her well-known poem from her 1960 collection The Bean Eaters, Brooks bases “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” on a horrific historical event: the highly publicized lynching of a 14-year- old black youngster, Emmett Till. While originally born in Mississippi, Till moved to Chicago when he was two years old. In 1955, Till and his cousin traveled to Money, Mississippi, to stay with Till’s great-uncle, Moses Wright. Till’s mother was well aware of the racial tension in the South, especially after the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, to end segregation in public schools. It was a landmark case that overturned the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which had previously allowed U.S. states and localities to mandate racial segregation.

Thus, Till’s mother had cautioned him about this racially charged area of Mississippi. On August 24, 1955, Emmett Till, entered Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in the town of Money, Mississippi. Till exited the store; soon afterward, so did Carolyn Bryant, the store owner’s wife. Although it is not clear exactly what transpired (sources vary), the official Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) report says that Till whistled at Bryant, who told her husband of the event several days later after he returned from a trip. According to the FBI report, which can be found at http://foia.fbi.gov/till/till.pdf: “On August 28, 1955, at approximately 2:30 a.m., Roy Bryant (Carolyn Bryant’s husband), J. W. Milam and at least one other person appeared at the home of Mose Wright, Till’s great uncle, looking for the boy who had ‘done the talking’ in Money and abducted Till from the home.”

The men then drove to a plantation, where they beat him, shot him in the head, tied a cotton gin fan around his neck, and threw him into the Tallahatchie River. His body was recovered on August 31, 1955. This nationally reported event fueled the growing Civil Rights movement. On May 10, 2004, the Justice Department reopened the case to determine whether anyone else was liable. While the grand jury found no credible evidence that others were involved and decided not to press charges against Carolyn Bryant, the report provided some sense of closure to a case studied and written about for over 50 years. In addition to Brooks’s work, which memorializes the event, the case inspired many poignant artworks, including the first play by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, poems by Langston Hughes and Audre Lorde, and a song by Bob Dylan called “The Death of Emmett Till.”

Told through the point of view of Carolyn Bryant, the white mother whose husband had just been acquitted of the murder of Emmett Till, the poem describes Bryant as she burns bacon, her mind occupied with the horrific murder and imagining the story in the form of a ballad. As with lyric poetry and fairy tales, she wants the story to conform to conventions, to fit her worldview and absolve her of guilt. Thus, she thinks of herself as “The milk-white maid” pursued by “the Dark Villain” (Till) and ultimately rescued by “the Fine Prince,” figures that might, from her dim recollection, appear in a ballad. But the poet is careful to create an ironic distance, noting that she does not even remember what a ballad is. These thoughts, interrupted by the burning of bacon, soon leave her as she dwells on the boy’s age and innocence:

The fun was disturbed, then all but nullified When the Dark villain was a blackish child Of fourteen, with eyes still too young to be
dirty,
And a mouth too young to have lost every reminder
Of its infant success.

As an image of Till rises to meet her, the fairy tale she has woven disintegrates, leaving her with “no thread capable of the necessary Sew-work.” Her meditation on the events, however, ends with hatred not for the boy who has been killed, but for her husband. The kiss he gives her is not of love but of death: “But his mouth would not go away and neither would the / Decapitated exclamation points in the Other Woman’s eyes.” The Other Woman is the mother of Emmett Till, and her presence increases the guilt of the Mississippi mother. As the poem ends, her husband pulls her close to kiss her, and she does nothing. Unlike the moment with Till, she just stands there as a hatred for her husband bursts “into glorious flower.”

For Discussion or Writing:
1. “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” is a long and unusual title for a long poem. In the poem, details from ordinary life, northern and southern, are interspersed with meditations on the perils of growing up black in America. What holds the poem together?

2. Compare “A Bronzeville Mother” with other poems from The Bean Eaters, such as “The Last Quatrain of Emmett Till,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” and the “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed.” As with a “Bronzeville Mother,” these poems are rooted in the history of racism, violence—especially lynching—and discrimination. Taken together, what stance do these different poetic voices form? What do they have to say about concrete moments in history? Finally, write a well-documented research paper that explores the historical events Brooks’s poems enshrine.

3. Research the history of lynching by visiting <http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/main. html>, which contains photographs and postcards of lynching in America. How does Brooks’s poem respond to such atrocities? What value lies in reflecting on a lynching story from a white perspective? How does this affect the tone of the poem?

4. Why do the lines grow briefer at the very end? What effect does this create, and why is this effect significant?

5. Compare this poem with Brooks’s poem “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” which reflects on Till’s mother. Why does Brooks dedicate so much space to Carolyn Bryant and so little to Till’s mother? Consider the style differences between the two poems. Why are these differences important, and how do they affect meaning?

“The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” (1960)

To understand this poem’s significance, it is important to understand the cultural context about which Brooks is writing, one alluded to in the poem’s epigraph, “Fall, 1957.” Brooks’s poem deals with what is called “the Little Rock Nine” or “the Little Rock crisis,” a landmark moment in the history of civil rights in America. After the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared all laws establishing segregated schools to be unconstitutional and called for the desegregation of American public schools, the NAACP worked to register students in all-white schools in the South.

The NAACP supported nine African-American students, who, on September 4, 1957, were blocked from entering Little Rock Central High School by the Arkansas National Guard under orders of the then-governor, Orval Faubus. President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard, demanded that they return to their armories, and sent the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the federal court order. In what most believe to be a political decision, Faubus closed Little Rock high schools for the 1958-59 school year.

The first-person narrator of the poem, a reporter from the Chicago Defender, a paper often read by blacks who migrated from the South and wanted to know about race relations there, is first struck by how unremarkable the people of Little Rock are. They bear children, “comb and part their hair, “watch want ads,” and repair their homes. They sing hymns, which they have rehearsed well and drink lemon teas, eat Lorna Doones, celebrate Christmas, play baseball, have open air concerts, love, show loving kindness to one another, and answer their phones out of courtesy.

All of these observations confuse the speaker, who is attempting to understand the people who have purportedly spread hatred. Here we see the poem’s complexity. As readers, we are asked to fill in many blanks, to interject the historical context, remember what has taken place, since we are privy to knowledge that the speaker does not have. This complex way of telling creates a sense of irony; the speaker spends most of the poem observing Little Rock’s normalcy and goodness, something that the reporter/speaker knows the Chicago Defender editor will not accept.

So the imagined answer of the editor hangs in the air, “Why?” While the poem never provides an answer, it makes a radical shift in the last 10 lines, with the speaker reporting on the white mass of people who spit and throw rocks, garbage, and fruit, harassing the Little Rock Nine as they make their way to the school building and who, in the final lines, are associated with the crucified Christ. Thus, in the end, the reader is left with a jarring juxtaposition, an unresolved set of observations that still need to be processed, examined, and understood.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Visit the Chicago Defender homepage, http:// www.chicagodefender.com/, and learn about its history. Take what you learn about the paper and apply it to Brooks’s poem, thinking about the historical significance of the paper, Brooks’s role as a reporter, and her poem on the subject.

2. Visit the Web site for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. There you will find archival documents related to the “Little Rock School Integration Crisis”: http://www. eisenhower.archives.gov/dl/LittleRock/little- rockdocuments.html. Read both the personal correspondence there as well as the official press releases. Finally, write a well-developed essay that assesses Eisenhower’s role in the integration of the Little Rock school system. What struggles did Eisenhower face? How did his course of action affect civil rights history? As a point of interest, you also may want to explore the correspondence between Jackie Robinson and President Eisenhower, a famous exchange between the first African-American professional baseball player of the modern era in 1957 and the then-president of the United States.

3. Analyze the final lines of Brooks’s poem: “The lariat lynch-wish I deplored.” / “The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.” Here Brooks makes a comparison with the crucifixion of Jesus. With these final lines in mind, trace the religious imagery in the poem. Why does Brooks fill the poem with such images? What is their effect? How does this imagery cast the African Americans known as the Little Rock Nine? How do both reflect a shift in Brooks’s perspective toward race relations in America?

4. Compare this poem with Countee Cullen’s sonnet “Christ Recrucified,” noting how each poem deals with race and religion. How do the Christ images in both poems function, and to whom do they refer? Do the poems employ these images ironically? Why or why not?