Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Analysis

History in Composition and Literature

One of the great things about Composition and Literature is that the readings can relate to many other topics outside of the class. The poems and the stories read in this class give a more in depth look at a specific subject and give a clearer picture of what life was like and how people lived at that time. In most classes about U.S. History, the sections taught on segregation don’t give specific examples of how people were treated or the perspectives of the people who were mistreated. However, reading Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry in the Composition and Literature course gives students an opportunity to learn greater details about segregation through the perspectives of the people most affected by it and the

specific example of Emmett Till’s story.
A theme in many of Brooks’ poems is segregation.

Reading these poems is an incredible learning experience because it allows readers to view segregation through the eyes of someone most affected by it. In the U.S. History course I took I didn’t take away the details and specific examples I did from reading and researching Brooks’ work. For example, the history textbook only mentioned one specific person who was affected by segregation, that person was Rosa Parks. The example of Rosa Parks demonstrated just one isolated incident of how black people were punished if they disobeyed the laws of segregation. In contrast, Brooks’ work demonstrates the everyday lives of black people living with segregation, which provides a much different perspective than what people are used to. An example, of this would be in Brooks’ poem “Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat”. The speaker of this poem hired a black maid and referred to her as “it”(103). By not using the maid’s name or using the pronoun her, the speaker is dehumanizing the maid. This poem expresses to readers that white people thought that black people weren’t like them, that they weren’t even

human.
Brooks also uses the theme of segregation in “kitchenette building.” In Brooks’ neighborhood, black families were basically forced to live in kitchenette buildings and they came to be a symbol of segregation. I learned this information after researching what a kitchenette building was because we didn’t go over much information about where black families lived in my history class except that they usually lived in the same areas. Brooks’ writing allows readers to learn about the experience of segregation through the many details about what everyday life was like through the eyes of the different speakers.
Two other poems that Brooks wrote were about a boy named Emmett Till.

He was 14 years old when two men beat and murdered him for supposedly flirting with one of the men’s wife. What I like about the first poem, “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” is that the speaker is the wife of the man who killed Emmett Till. By using the wife as the speaker, Brooks was able to convey the message, to all people regardless of race, that segregation and killing people because of the color of their skin is wrong. Brooks also wrote “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till.” This poem serves to demonstrate how the loss of Emmett Till affected his mother and how every mother would react in the same way if she lost her child. This proves that both black and white people have the same feelings and emotions; therefore they are the same. This was the point Brooks was trying to get across when writing these poems. If I had not read Brooks’ poems or researched the meanings behind them, I would not have a different perspective of the subject of segregation I learned in my history

class.
In conclusion, the readings in Composition and Literature discuss in depth details about many different subjects. I chose to write about how Gwendolyn Brooks’ work connected to a U.S. History class I took in high school because it filled in many of the details that were missing from the history course about segregation. Overall, the connection between Brooks’ work and the history class gave me a greater perspective as to what was actually going on during the time of segregation.