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Gwendolyn BrooksA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
A seminal moment in Brooks’s career was attending the Second Black Writers Conference at Fisk University in 1967, where she encountered young Black poets who called for art that would create the consciousness necessary for Black liberation. Her sense of what she could and should do with poetry shifted as a result. Brooks found that direction when she attended a musical revue called Opportunity Please Knock, the brainchild of Oscar Brown, Jr., a well-known lyricist.
Brown cast members and ex-members of the teenage street gang the Blackstone Rangers, and the Rangerettes, the auxiliary girl gang. He believed the revue was “an ideal opportunity to focus public attention on the vast, untapped resource of talent possessed by young people in black ghettos” (“‘Opportunity Please Knock.’” Ebony Magazine. August 1967, p. 103). The Blackstone Rangers, “[y]ouths whom society had labeled incorrigible eagerly stepped into new roles” to make the revue possible (“‘Opportunity’” 103). Brown believed the revue generated such excitement among the Blackstone Rangers because, despite the inequality and racism that marred their lives, “‘they’re not too disillusioned to work hard—if they ever had any illusions at all. It is up to us to give them a better picture of reality” (“‘Opportunity’” 103).
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A Sunset of the City
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Boy Breaking Glass
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Cynthia in the Snow
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Maud Martha
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my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
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Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)
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The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
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The birth in a narrow room
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The Crazy Woman
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The Lovers of the Poor
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The Mother
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the rites for Cousin Vit
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To Be in Love
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To The Diaspora
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Ulysses
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We Real Cool
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