In the poem “Gwendolyn Brooks” (1969), Madhubuti describes the acclaim that Brooks received in this predominately “whites only” publishing edifice. The speaker in “Gwendolyn Brooks” inveighs against Brook’s reception by white literati. Mudhubuti states sardonically, “a whi-te critical said: /’she’s a credit to the Negro race.’” All through the 1960s, Brooks gains a large black readership. In this context, her; largely connects Brooks’ evolution from a “Negro poet” to the black aesthetic that emerged in the 1960s.
The second stanza, in which Madhubuti presents the explosive nature of this black aesthetic, begins with the words, “into the sixties/ a words was born BLACK/ & with black came poets / & from the poet’s ball point came: / black double black purple-black blue-black been black was/ black day before yesterday blacker than ultra black”(13). The speaker in the poem understands blackness as that which is not “negro.” The word “black” that “was born” in the 1960s signified a political and cultural awakening of the “negro.”
As opposed to the label “fine Negro poet” given to Brooks by white literary critics, Madhubuti attributes the intensity of “ultra blackness” to Brooks. Madhubuti uses the “Negro” on the possibility of the “black light” as he anticipates how racists underpin of the associations of light with enlightenment. Black became the movement’s trope for an imagined resolution of an imagined contradiction. Black Arts Movement poets, photographers, and theorists wrestled to imagine new aesthetic experiences of light itself.
One increasing trend among black Americans in the 1960s involved remaining and this trend can be related to the desire for a Black Nationalist identity. The very term used to describe the race changed during this decade from “Negro” to “black”—African American emerged in the final decade of the twentieth century, where it remained alongside “black or “Black” as the acceptable terms of racial identification (Ogren 201). The relationship between Haki Madhubuti and Gwendolyn Brooks is a contemporary reminder of the behavior of dispersed enslaved people during the epoch of American slavery. Madhubuti and Brooks did not deliberately go in search of one another, but once found each other, they never parted.
Madhubuti notes that “time magazine is the / authority of the knee/grow,” using the pun on “Negro,” he describes Brook’s “totally real” makeup and sarcastically listing her credits as “ a fine Negro poet,” he defines the words “black” in a jazz-like improvisational stream of unpunctuated compounds of increasing sophistication “black is beautiful black is discoverable negro/ black substance black”(21). Having denigrated and replaced the term “negro,” Madhubuti finally acknowledges Brooks as a “black poet.”
In the 1920s, in the United States, the term black was very multivalent. For some African Americans in the 1920s, the term black simply meant dark skin. Overall African Americans in the 1920s did not use the term as a reference to the race. In “What are we?”, An article published in 1926 in The Messenger, George Grant argues that the term Black American satisfies “ a long felt want.” As he explains the difference between the name Black American and the name Negro, he argues that Negros are colored people but Americans (Jordan 181). If it is inevitable to differentiate them from the white Americans, the instead they are black Americans; not all are black, not all are white but the term ‘black’ and white are used for clarifying rather than describing. Such rationale used for black was different from the argument used in the Black Art Movements. Grant insists that the black may only be necessary as an addition to American; the term American is the base term, in his view the black signifies a secondary racial classification.
Works Cited
Madhubuti, H. R. (1972). Gwendolyn Brooks: Beyond the Wordmaker—The Making of an African Poet. Preface. Brooks, Report, 13-30.
Ogren, K. J. (1989). The jazz revolution: twenties America & the meaning of jazz. Oxford University Press, USA.
Jordan, W. D. (1968). White over black: American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812. UNC Press Books.
