21 pages • 42 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksThe Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1957A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Colors
A color motif runs throughout the poem, highlighting the kind of racism based on the darkness of skin tone (colorism), as well as connecting nature with pleasure. At the end of the poem, “brownish” is repeated in Lines 55 and 58: “brownish girls” and “brownish boy,” respectively. These lines refer to the Black students whose attendance at Little Rock Central High School made national news. They were discriminated against because of their skin tone, and the repetition of the color emphasizes the kind of prejudice they faced.
There is some ambiguity—or multiple ways—in which the other colors that appear in the poem can be read. For instance, the outdoor concerts are “on the special twilight green” (Line 23). Green connects to nature and shared recreational space. Twilight is made up of colors that are mentioned later in the stanza about love. Women “re-teach purple and unsullen blue” (Line 34). These are colors associated with twilight, offering one reading of the romantic encounter happening outside. Pleasure itself could be associated through synesthesia (a crossing of senses) with these colors, or the colors could refer to some of the darkest skin tones (blue-black is often discussed in the context of colorism).
Hair
Another motif that highlights the embodied and visible differences of the Little Rock residents is hair. Early in the poem, the phrase “comb and part their hair” (Line 2) could apply to residents of any race. It highlights how white and Black people are similar in their daily lives, and how racists engage in the same mundane activities as people who are actively anti-racist. Later in the poem, in a parenthetical (an aside), the hair of the Black schoolgirls is mentioned: “bows and barrettes in the curls / And braids” (Lines 56-57). This is a reference to hairstyles that are specific to Black hair. This poem was written shortly before the natural Black hair movement, which began in the 1960s. Despite the efforts of activists and allies, Black hair remains a controversial topic even into the new millennium.
News and Reporting
A third motif is the use of print and physical media, which even the Chicago Defender itself moved away from in the late 2010s. Details about the tools available to journalists and other writers further helps the reader understand the time in which the poem was written. The speaker in Brooks’s poem uses a “prim and pencilled pad” (Line 43). This pad of paper was probably a small notebook, spiral-bound at the top, meaning it could be flipped open—the iconic journalist’s notebook. Another detail about physical media is the “Telegraph” (47), which was a machine that transmitted messages that were printed onto paper. Journalism has been profoundly changed by the rise of digital media and the decline of print newspapers. Even the action indicated in the poem’s title, sending a “man” (a writer) to report on a story in another state, is no longer the standard journalistic practice. Many newspapers rely on news briefs from large organizations, like the Associated Press, in the new millennium.
Related Titles
By Gwendolyn Brooks
