The Blackstone Rangers

A seminal moment in Brooks’s career was attending the Second Black Writers Conference at Fisk University in 1967, where she encountered young Black poets who called for art that would create the consciousness necessary for Black liberation. Her sense of what she could and should do with poetry shifted as a result. Brooks found that direction when she attended a musical revue called Opportunity Please Knock, the brainchild of Oscar Brown, Jr., a well-known lyricist.

Brown cast members and ex-members of the teenage street gang the Blackstone Rangers, and the Rangerettes, the auxiliary girl gang. He believed the revue was “an ideal opportunity to focus public attention on the vast, untapped resource of talent possessed by young people in black ghettos” (“‘Opportunity Please Knock.’” Ebony Magazine. August 1967, p. 103). The Blackstone Rangers, “[y]ouths whom society had labeled incorrigible eagerly stepped into new roles” to make the revue possible (“‘Opportunity’” 103). Brown believed the revue generated such excitement among the Blackstone Rangers because, despite the inequality and racism that marred their lives, “‘they’re not too disillusioned to work hard—if they ever had any illusions at all. It is up to us to give them a better picture of reality” (“‘Opportunity’” 103).