February is Black History Month. Artists and writers played an active role in the civil rights movement. Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an American poet, author, and teacher. Brooks "is one of the most highly regarded, influential, and widely read poets of 20th-century American poetry." The themes of her work primarily focused on the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in the black community. In 1950, Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry making her the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize. She composed “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till” for a black youth murdered in Mississippi in 1955 and authored more explicit social criticism in her volume “The Bean Eaters” (1960). Poetry was a central form of expression for the Black Arts Movement which was the “artistic branch” of the Black Power Movement of the late 1960’s and 1970’s.
Brooks was poet laureate of Chicago (1968-2000), Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1985-1986), and the first African-American woman inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters.
