We Real Cool

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.