The birth in a narrow room

At her death in 2000, Gwendolyn Brooks, along with gospel icon Mahalia Jackson and jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, was recognized as the most influential figure in what came to be called Chicago’s Black Renaissance. In that movement, much as in the Harlem Renaissance in New York during the 1920s, a gathering of innovative Black writers, musicians, and visual artists asserted the integrity of the Black community by giving the Black experience a voice, an urgency directed at segregated America. Indeed, one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most respected figures, poet Langston Hughes, recognized the quiet power in the poetry of a young Gwendolyn Brooks.

Two historic realities, however, shaped the emergence of Chicago’s Black Renaissance and in turn shaped the creative heart of Brooks. The first was the Great Migration, the movement north of Black families from the limited economic opportunities and racism of the Deep South. The second was the Great Depression. Brooks grew up within a grim world of limited expectations, routine sacrifice, and the hard-scrapple heroism of just getting by. Poverty, as much as race and gender, impacted her early poetry.

Brooks, like the artists in the Harlem Renaissance, perceived her role as more than using her writing to voice the Black experience.