This chapter addresses the flowering of African American poetry that occurs from 1945 to 1970 against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and in the context of a period of tumultuous change in the history of race relations in America. The chapter discusses how poets such as Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka grapple in various ways with fraught questions about aesthetics, race, identity, and politics. The chapter examines the emergence of the influential and controversial movement known as the Black Arts Movement (led by poets including Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni) in the context of the turbulent racial violence and social justice movements of the 1960s.

Without a Messiah expected, and if one’s current pain or trial is meaningless, why not commit suicide? In the Modernist canon, suicide is typically putting an end to one’s misery because there’s no reason not to do so, or because one is in any event a machine caused to do so by necessary causes and effects. Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus is an essay on how to live without hope or suicide; his novel The Plague starts with an averted suicide and ends with limited hope – or a hope for limits. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot begins and ends with the central duo’s wish, both times deferred, to hang themselves. Modernist responses to the question of meaning, and the attendant problem of suicide, include: persisting in hope or waiting despite the minimal probability of hope’s fulfillment (Franz Kafka, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Beckett); the epiphanies of the everyday, getting what it seemed you hoped for even without exactly having hoped for it (Virginia Woolf); affirmation of the repetitions, recurrences, and accidents of natural and human life, overcoming their sameness through an act of will (Camus).

This chapter examines Gwendolyn Brooks’s representation of everyday African American lives in what was at midcentury affectionately known as “Bronzeville.” Her literature elevates the ways these people – especially Black women – found meaning and value in their regular lives, even as they lived in the shadow of a disinterested and segregated city. With a focus on Brooks’s first collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, and her novel, Maud Martha, this chapter explores how Brooks’s writing exemplifies humanism and places it in the same populist Chicago tradition of Carl Sandburg, while also maintaining ties to the sociologically informed neighborhood writing of Richard Wright, James T. Farrell, and Nelson Algren. Even though Brooks did not define herself as an African American humanist, she engages with some of its core concepts. Namely, she shows how Black people challenge Christian ideals and how they process death and loss without relying on religious doctrines. Instead, Brooks’s characters look inward and toward their community for aid and redemption.

Focusing on the work of Stuart Dybek and a case study of the literature of South Shore, this chapter considers how the neighborhood literature of Chicago has taken shape in response not only to literary antecedents but also to historical changes in the city’s neighborhood order. The emergence of the New Chicago, a post-industrial metropolis that developed through and around the old familiar industrial city, created new possibilities for the city’s writers. Stuart Dybek’s stories of Pilsen/Little Village have made him the dean of the New Chicago’s writers, putting him at the head of a cohort that ranges from Gwendolyn Brooks to David Mamet, Nelson Algren to Gabriel Bump.

In 1927, Richard Wright arrived from Mississippi into Chicago, a city where he stayed for ten years, his most formative years as a writer and a period for him of political and intellectual radicalization. It was in Bronzeville, of course, where Bigger was born. Wright educated himself in Chicago within leftist literary circles, among the artists and writers of the John Reed Club, at the George Cleveland Hall Branch library, and through the interracial collaborations of the WPA’s Illinois Writers Project. Wright wrote stories while working on the project, including “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1938), and he collaborated on a provocative literary manifesto, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937). Wright met sociologist Horace Cayton Jr., for whom he wrote a forceful and luminous introduction to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), co-authored by Cayton and St. Clair Drake. A kind of ars poetica, Wright’s introduction illuminates how the conditions of Chicago were also the conditions of European fascism, and how the psychological disorder wrought by racism was connected to the burgeoning struggles for decolonization in Africa. Wright also reveals his commitment to both a Chicago tradition of social realism and the experimental styles of transatlantic modernism.

In the years following Richard Wright’s death in 1960, fellow author Margaret Walker created a somewhat vengeful portrait of the author, one that characterized his literary aspirations as tied to his aspersion for African American women authors. This essay shows how Wright worked alongside African American women writers and could be quite helpful to them – even though he never acknowledged a debt to black women writers or white women writers (like Stowe), with the exception of the modernist Stein. The “antagonistic cooperation” found in his relationships with Hurston, Walker, Brooks, and other women authors ultimately demonstrates African American literature’s gradual enrichment through variety if not fellowship.

This chapter follows the lasting influence of Harlem Renaissance writers on Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry, even after the 1967 Fisk Writers’ conference. Specifically, it turns to Riot (1969) to think about its continuity with the poetry most closely associated with the New Negro Renaissance. This is not done for the sake of periodizing Brooks as part of the earlier generation, nor to detach her later work from its formation in and of the Black Arts Movement. Rather, the chapter traces in Brooks’s work the development of a tradition of Black migratory poetics: poetry that formally and imaginatively enacts human transnational movement. Brooks’s migratory poetry illuminates and at times dismantles violence and constraint, but also turns its back on borders, attempting to find, create, define, and take up space beyond the nation state. As such, Riot also provides a key pivot or transition between Black modernist poetics and our contemporary moment in poetry.