December 2000/
January 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

In Memoriam: Gwendolyn Brooks, 1917 - 2000

Gwendolyn Brooks, poet laureate of Illinois, died on December 3, 2000 at her home in Chicago. Born in 1917 in Kansas, she grew up on Chicago's South Side and wrote and worked there throughout her life.

She began writing poetry before she was a teenager, and was enthusiastically supported by her mother, who often told her, "You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar." Prompted by her mother, she sent her poems to Langston Hughes, who wrote back: "You have talent. Keep writing! You'll have a book published someday." Hughes went on to become a longtime friend and supporter.

Brooks became known as a poet first for her ability to describe the lives of poor black people in Chicago. Richard Wright said that she was able to capture "the pathos of petty destinies, the whimper of the wounded, the tiny incidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problems of common prejudice." She wrote, she said, from firsthand observation: "I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street. I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then the other. There was my material."

Brooks won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for Annie Allen, and by the early 1960s she had reached a high point in her writing career. She was a sought-after teacher and a poet who was valued for her sensitive portraits of black women, her precise use of language, and the universality of her work. But by the end of the decade she had transformed herself and her poetry, influenced by the young black writers of the next generation. In 1967 she attended a conference of black writers at Fisk University, where she heard readings by Amiri Baraka and Ron Milner, among others. "I felt that something new was happening," she said afterward. She later wrote: "If it hadn't been for these young people, these young writers who influenced me, I wouldn't know what I know about this society. By associating with them I know who I am."

With In the Mecca, published in 1968, she explored new themes of desperation, tragedy, and political awareness in the lives of Chicago's black people; and with Riot, in 1969, she began to pubish only with black presses. She published many more volumes of poetry, including Winnie in 1988 and Children Coming Home in 1991, and several nonfiction works as well. And while the news media largely ignored her work after she left Harper & Row, she continued throughout her life to receive recognition in the form of awards, honorary degrees, and, in 1994, the Jefferson Lectureship of the National Endowment of the Humanities--"the absolute award crown of my career," she said.

"All my life is not writing," Brooks once told an intervewer. "My greatest interest is being involved with young people." To that end, she gave readings at schools, prisons, and hospitals and attended annual poetry contests for school-age children, which she sponsored, judged, and often paid for out of her own pocket.

--Compiled from the New York Times, 12/5/00 and from Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, Darlene Clark Hine, ed. (Brooklyn, Carlson Publishing, 1993)

Medgar Evers
(For Charles Evers)

The man whose height his fear improved he
arranged to fear no further. The raw
intoxicated time was time for better birth or
a final death.
Old styles, old tempos, all the engagement of
the day--the sedate, the regulated fray--
the antique light, the Moral rose, old gusts,
tight whistlings from the past, the mothballs
in the Love at last our man forswore.

Medgar Evers annoyed confetti and assorted
brands of businessmen's eyes.

The shows came down: to maxims and surprise.
And palsy.

Roaring no rapt arise-ye to the dead, he
leaned across tomorrow. People said that
he was holding clean globes in his hands.

1968

Medgar Evers, a black civil rights leader in Misissippi, was assassinated in 1963, shot in his own driveway in the presence of his wife and children.

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