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Gwendolyn BrooksWe Real Cool
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1960A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Literary Context
Gwendolyn Brooks was a key figure in the Chicago Black Renaissance literary movement, representing the middle stage of the movement. As her biography states, Brooks came of age in Chicago, during a period of time in American history characterized by racial injustice. The Chicago Black Renaissance took place from the 1930s to the 1950s, when a group of Black writers and intellectuals banded together in response to the observable impact of racial injustice on their urban Black community. They wrote plays, poems, and novels that depicted the marginalizing and damaging effect of Jim Crow laws on Black Americans, taking care to expose the brutality and violence of the laws as well as the widespread systemic racism that pervaded institutions all over America at this time. Though members of the Chicago Black Renaissance focused much of their energy on creating literature, they also dedicated resources, time, and effort to the establishment of community centers in Black neighborhoods that offered Black Americans a place to further their cultural, educational, and creative interests. One of the most well-known community centers is the George Cleveland Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library on Michigan Avenue.
Alongside novelist Richard Wright, author of the much-read novel Native Son, and playwright Lorraine Hansberry, whose play Raisin in the Sun captures the experience of African Americans in Chicago living according to the laws of segregation, Brooks helped amplify the voices of Black Americans who were gathering their forces in preparation for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Brooks, a prolific poet and writer, wrote seven books in total. One early collection of her lyrics and ballads parodies The Aeneid; in this brief work, Brooks gathers shorter works into one coherent tragi-comic narrative poem and called it The Anniad. In 1945, A Street in Bronzeville was published, Brooks’s first volume of poetry named for the one of the largest Black communities in America that existed in Chicago. Four years later, in 1949, Brooks published more poetry in her volume titled Annie Allen, which won the Pulitzer Prize, followed by her novel Maud Martha in 1953. In 1960, Brooks’s final volume of poetry appeared, titled The Bean Eaters. The state of Illinois recognized Brooks’s prodigious contributions to American literature in 1968, when she was appointed the state’s Poet Laureate.
Historical Context
Though the Jim Crow laws—which were enacted in the aftermath of the Civil War and remained in force on for a hundred years through to 1968—are often associated with the geographical region of the American South, they in fact impacted Black lives all over America. The Great Migration of 1916, for example, involved the flight of an estimated six million Black Americans from the restrictive South to the urban centers of the North. In Brooks’s northern city of Chicago, echoes of the Southern Jim Crows laws enabled discriminatory practices against Black Americans to persist, which led to the Establishment of the Chicago Black Renaissance literary movement and other similar cultural movements elsewhere in the United States.
The Jim Crows laws were established in direct response to the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery in America. These codes of law severely restricted where Black people could seek employment and how much money they could earn in the South; this economic detail offers context to Brooks’s poem, where the boys skip school and gather at the pool hall, feeling disinterested in investing time and energy in an adult life that will not compensate them properly for the limited work they may do. In Chicago, there were more opportunities for Black people to earn a living than in the South, but the mass migration meant that competition for employment was high; cities like Chicago became over-crowded, and racial prejudice persisted, exacerbating the tense atmosphere and causing significant interracial strife amongst the city-dwellers.
Bronzeville, the Black community in Chicago of the title of Brooks’s first volume of poetry, was one of the largest Black communities in the whole of the United States. Like Harlem in New York City, Bronzeville became a Black enclave because it was a place to which African Americans could still move even as housing restrictions and increasing rents intensified during the time of the Great Migration. By the 1970’s, the demographics of the South and the North had changed dramatically; in 1900, 90% of Black Americans resided in the Southern states, and this number dropped to 50% by 1970.
Related Titles
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