Sample entry; reduced to (75%) original size GWEND' 'N BROOKS Gwendolyn Brooks Poet Born June 7. 1917. Topeka. Kansas ‘I have notebooks dating from the time | was 11. when | started to keep my poems in composition books. My mother decided that | was to be the female Paul Laurence Dunbar.” wendolyn Elizabeth Brooks. the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize. received the award in 1950 for Annie Allen. a book of poems focusing on the black urban poor. Since then she has produced some twenty poetry books as well as numerous other works. including two writing manuals for chil- dren, Young Poet's Primer (1981) and Very Young Poets (1983) Although Brooks has written on a wide range of subjects. she is especially known for her poems about everyday life in the cities. She draws sensitive portraits of people caught up by poverty. sharing with her readers their joys and griefs. The power apparent in the poems is due to Brooks's technical mastery. “Very early in life T became fascinated with the wonders of language.” she once said. “and Tbegan to play’ with words. That word-play is what I have been known for chiefly.” Began to publish poems in the Defender Many of Brooks’s poems are set in Chicago. where she has lived since she was a baby: She and her brother. Raymond. were given a very cultured upbrit Their mother. Keziah (Wims) Brooks. had been schoolteacher. and she composed songs for the children and en- couraged them to read and write at a very young age. Their father. David Brooks. worked as a janitor but had hoped to be a doctor, Determined that his children would have the benefit of a thorough education. he encouraged them and often read aloud to them from the Harvard Classics. By the time Brooks was eleven. she was reading everything she could lay her hands on. from the novels of L.M. Montgomery to the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. She was par- ticularly attracted to Dunbar. the nineteenth- century African American poet. and when she started writing poetry. her mother prophesied that one day she would become the “/ady Paul Laurence Dunbar.” Brooks. who had written her first poem when she was seven. had her first poem published in a children’s magazine when she was thirteen. By the time she was sixteen. her poems were appearing in the De- Jfender. a Chicago daily newspaper. At her mother’s suggestion. Brooks sent some of her poems to Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. two leading poets in the Harlem Renaissance literary movement. Hughes later became a good friend. guiding her development as a poet. Both men rec nized the girl's talent and encouraged her to carry on writing. and Johnson suggested that she read the works of such modern poets as TS. Eliot and e.e. cummings. This the young poet eagerly did. both at home and in school. but her school years were not entirely happy. Brooks enjoyed leaming. but the many white students at High Park Branch made her feel inferior. She later attended Wendell Phillips 6Gwendolyn Brooks High School and finally Englewood High School, where she felt slightly more at home. But since she felt that her darker color made her unpopular, she kept very much to herself. Hailed as major new poet Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior Col- lege with an English degree in 1936, then worked for the Youth Council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where she met her future husband, Henry Blakely, Jr., who also wanted to be a writer. Both twenty-one when they met, they married in 1939, beginning a long if sometimes stormy partnership. They had two children, Henry and Nora. From 1941 on Brooks regularly attended a writer’s workshop led by writer and scholar Inez Cunningham Stark. In 1943 she won a poetry award from the Midwestern Writers Conference and submitted a collection of po- ems to the Harper & Row publishing house, GWE! 'N BROOKS which appeared in 1945 as A Street in Bronzeville This book delighted critics, and Brooks was hailed as a major new poet. Her poems took a perceptive look at the ordinary black people she saw every day in Chicago. The first section of the book depicted life in a neighborhood called Bronzeville. The second section, consisting of twelve sonnets, looked at the prejudice blacks suffered in the armed forces. Critics praised her handling of the sub- ject matter as well as her artistry and technical skill. The accomplished way Brooks chose and used words to convey her meaning indi- cated that here was a poet who had practiced her craft and knew how to handle words with maximum effect. A Street in Bronzeville brought Brooks a Guggenheim fellowship as well as the honor of being named one of Mademoiselle maga- zine’s Ten Women of the Year. Her next book, Annie Allen (1949), received the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, the first time the prize was ever awarded to any African American for a book of poetry. Annie Allen centered on the life of a young black woman, also the focus of the novel Maud Martha, which Brooks published in 1953. Brooks’s only novel, Maud Martha has been considered as lightweight but is beau- tifully written and deeper than it at first seems. Brooks published Bronzeville Boys and Girls, a collection of poetry for children, in 1956, and another children’s collection, The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves, in 1974. Developed a political outlook Among Brooks’s audience were some black writers who accused her of writing for whites 87fe DE BROWN only and of using language that was too com- plicated for ordinary people to understand. When Brooks attended the Black Writers Con- ference at Fisk University in 1967. she met writers who made a deep impression on her. “They seemed proud and so committed to their own people.” she remarked. “The poets among them felt that black poets should write as blacks. about blacks. and address themn- selves 10 blacks.” As a result Brooks decided to write in a way that black people could easily relate to. and she developed a more open, free-verse style of writing. The conference also made Brooks more political. more consciously concemed with social problems. Her next two books. In the Mecca (1968) and Riot (1969). examined so- cial issues. and later books dealt with such topics as rebellion and black nationalism. In the Mecca marked Brooks's defection from her longtime publisher, Harper & Row. to Broadside Press. a black publishing company. and Brooks claimed she would follow this policy with future books. Her autobiography. Report from Part One, was published in 1972 by Broadside Press. Uses position to mentor others In 1968 Brooks was created poet laureate of Ilinois. and she has received numerous other poetry awards. including honorary degrees from forty-nine universities and colleges. Brooks was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1985: a school was named for her in Harvey, Illinois: and the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for African Ameri- can Literature was established at Western TIli- nois University. Brooks has used her stature as a poet to help others. She has lectured widely. not only at colleges and universities. but also in jails and in drug-treatment centers—anywhere she thinks people may relate to her poems. At schools she has encouraged students to write and to keep journals, Brooks has mentored up-and-coming poets. especially young black poets, and has organized numerous poetry competitions. often providing the prize money out of her own pocket Brooks still sees herself very much as a voice speaking to and for black people. “My aim.” she declared. “is to write poems that will somehow successfully ‘call ... all black people ... in gutters. in schools, offices. facto- ries. prisons. the consulate: I wish to reach black people in pulpits. black people in mines. on farms. on thrones.” Yet. like all poets. Brooks is writing for anyone who will listen. She has said that although her writing is co blacks. it is also for “anyone who will open the book.” Claude Brown Writer Born February 23, 1937. New York. New York “1 didn't have any dreams of becoming anything. All | knew for certain was that | had my fears.” laude Brown is celebrated for two real- ml istic books he wrote about life in Harlem—his autobiography. Manchild in the 88UDE BROWN Promised Land (1965), and The Children of Ham (1976). Brown’s autobiography has often been cited as the first book to describe the experi- ence of urban African Americans in a truly effective manner. It gives a grim picture of life for families who had moved from the planta- tions of the South, dreaming of a golden fu- ture and ending up in a Harlem slum, sur- rounded by thieves and drug addicts. This was the world Brown knew—the world of his childhood in the 1940s and 1950s. Shot in the stomach at age thirteen Claude Brown was the eldest of the four chil- dren of Henry and Ossie Brown. both of whom were from South Carolina. After moving to Harlem in 1935. they retained the awe and fear of whites that had been instilled in them in the South. calling white men “sir” and sel- dom speaking up for their rights. This defer- ential attitude infuriated Brown. “They were in New York.” he wrote in his autobiography. “but it seemed like their minds were still down there in the South Carolina cotton fields.” Brown's father worked on the railroad and expected his two sons to take similar jobs. When Brown's younger brother said he wanted to be an airline pilot. he was immedi- ately put down. That type of work was for whites, he was told. A boy from Harlem should be thinking of something sensible. like being a janitor. Brown responded to his parents” behavior by becoming a rebel. Egged on by older boys in the neighborhood. he was a practiced thief before he was even old enough to go to school. At school he got into fights so often that he decided not to bother going. and he regularly played hooky. He also joined the Buccaneers gang. “By the time I was nine years old.” wrote Brown. “I had been hit by a bus. thrown into the Harlem River intentionally. hit by a car. severely beaten with a chain. And I had set the house afire.~ For Brown and his friends. there seemed nothing much to do except steal and get into fights with other gangs. “Boy. why you so bad?” his mother used to ask despairingly. By the age of eleven Brown had been expelled from three schools and had frequently been up before the children’s court. After repeated ar- rests for theft. he was sent to Wiltwyck School for Boys. where he spent the next two years. However. soon after his release. Brown was shot in the stomach by an angry homeowner whose bedspreads he had been stealing. Just thirteen years old at the time. he thought he Wg to die. But he pulled through and was sent to Warwick. another reform school. This tumed out to be a home away from home. because most of Brown's friends were there too. was g His autobiography received critical acclaim Brown anticipated a bleak future with no sense of purpose but to steal. drink. smoke. make out with girls—it didn’t add up to much. When let out of Warwick after nine months. he found so little to do that he voluntarily went hack to the school. Many of his friends were already well on the road to ruin and heavily into drugs. Several had committed murders. and some had gone to the electric chair. Brown won- dered if he would end up the same way 89CLAUDE BROWN Claude Brown ‘Two things saved him: his own strength of character—demonstrated by the fact that he resisted getting hooked on heroin—and the help he received from the staff of the reform schools. Ernest Papanek, the director of Wiltwyck, was a long-standing influence, con- stantly trying to get Brown to realize that he could amount to something if he made the effort. Another significant influence was the superintendent's wife at Warwick, who lent Brown books about achievers such as physi- cist Albert Einstein. Brown was fascinated. Here was a whole world he had never dreamed of—people with a solid sense of purpose and tremendous persistence. He decided that he, too, would make the effort. He would break free of Harlem and get himself an education. ‘At the age of seventeen Brown moved to Greenwich Village and for the first time in his life took a real job, rather than making money by selling drugs or stealing. It was the type of job his father would have chosen for him— working as a busboy at a hamburger joint— but it brought in enough to pay for his courses at night school. Meanwhile he joined a sports. club, where he met a musician who encour- aged him to leam the piano. Within a year he was playing in jazz groups. Occasionally Brown returned to Harlem to visit his parents and look up old friends, but his friends were increasingly hard to find. Some were away serving prison sentences, many were heavily into drugs, and others were dead. One of his closest friends fell off a roof while under the influence of heroin. A few of Brown’s group managed to break free of drugs, but most could not do so, despite his efforts to help them. ‘Through all this time Brown kept in touch with Emest Papanek at Wiltwyck, and in the early 1960s Papanek persuaded him to write an article about Harlem for Dissent magazine. A powerful piece, the article attracted the at- tention of the publishers at Macmillan, and they offered to pay Brown’s expenses while he wrote a book about his life in Harlem. The result was his autobiography, Manchild in the Promised Land, which Brown completed in 1963. It was published in 1965, the same year he triumphantly graduated with a B.A. from Howard University. Manchild was highly praised by the re- viewers and was taken up by the civil rights movement because it gave such a faithful and devastating picture of what life was like in the black ghettos of the big cities. Brown’s sec- ond book, The Children of Ham (1976), re- turned to the same subject but with a different twist. It is the story of a group of black teenag- ers who gather in abandoned apartments where 90Lar Uae 1a (OL they can live free of heroin. Their aim is to stay clean and stay in school. This book at- tracted less attention than Brown’s autobi raphy. but it too gave a chilling picture of the streets of Harlem in the 1950s and 1960s. While Brown was making his way as a writer, he carried on with his education. study- ing in the law schools of Stanford and Rutgers universities. He has since worked with the Harlem Improvement Project Group and other organizations. His autobiography remains a classic of American literature. while his meta- morphosis from child criminal to social activ- ist stands as an example of what can be achieved even against overwhelming odds. H. Rap Brown Writer, political activist Born October 4. 1943. Baton Rouge. Louisiana “I'm not happy to be here and | think its unnecessary that we have to be here protesting against the brutality that Black people are being subjected to.” uthor of the controversial book Die Nigger Die! and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the late 1960s. H. Rap Brown was an outspoken leader who advocated violence to achieve civil rights. In the reactionary times following assassination of the movement's nonviolent leader. Martin Luther King. Jr.. Brown's appearances in several large Ameri- ities provoked riots. His pro-violence stance. which included recommending that black people use guns to assert their rights. ran him into trouble with the law. and he was eventually sent to jail in the early 1970s. Met with President Johnson Brown was bom Hubert Gerold Brown on October 4. 1943. to Eddie and Thelma Brown of Baton Rouge. Louisiana. His father worked for an oil company. From 1960 to 1964 Brown, studied sociology at Southern University. a black college in his hometown. where he felt the administration was unwilling to stand up against racial injustice. Afier graduating. he worked in Washing- ton. D.C...as a librarian for the Department of, Agriculture. Then he became a neighborhood worker fora government antipoverty program. but left feeling that blacks were being co- opted for the program. “The poverty pro- gram.” he later wrote. “was designed to take those people whom the goverment consid- ered threatening to the structure and buy them off. It didn’t address itself to the causes of poverty but to the effects of poverty.” Although he tried to use government pro- grams to bring about social change. Brown became increasingly frustrated with them and explored other options. In 1965 he became chairman of the Washington-based Nonvio- ent Action Group and joined several other black leaders meeting with President Lyndon. Johnson. Brown gained attention for criticiz~ ing the strong-willed president. “I am not happy to be here.” he remembered telling Johnson. “and I think it’s unnecessary that we have to be here protesting against the bru- tality that black people are subjected to.” 91