The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock

by Gwendolyn Brooks

Note: The Chicago Defender was the foremost newspaper published in the United States for black readers through the middle of the 20^th century. It began publication in Chicago in 1905, when it was founded by Robert S. Abbott, with an initial investment of twenty-five cents. By the 1950s, when the paper became a daily, its circulation was over 250,000, but it dropped off significantly during the 1990s. In January 2001, it was offered at auction to pay the company’s debts. Its owners estimated at that time that running the paper, including the purchase price, would be a $30 million undertaking.

Fall, 1957

In Little Rock the people bear

Babes, and comb and part their hair

And watch the want ads, put repair

To roof and latch.  While wheat toast burns

A woman waters multiferns.

Time upholds, or overturns,

The many, tight, and small concerns.

In Little Rock the people sing

Sunday hymns like anything,

Through Sunday pomp and polishing.

And after testament and tunes,

Some soften Sunday afternoons

With lemon tea and Lorna Doones.

I forecast

And I believe

Come Christmas Little Rock will cleave

To Christmas tree and trifle, weave,

From laugh and tinsel, texture fast.

In Little Rock is baseball; Barcarolle.

That hotness in July . . . the uniformed figures raw and implacable

And not intellectual,

Batting the hotness or clawing the suffering dust.

The Open Air Concert, on the special twilight green . . . .

When Beethoven is brutal or whispers to lady-like air.

Blanket-sitters are solemn, as Johann troubles to lean

To tell them what to mean. . . .

There is love, too, in Little Rock.  Soft women softly

Opening themselves in kindness,

Or, pitying one's blindness,

Awaiting one's pleasure

In azure

Glory with anguished rose at the root. . . .

To wash away old semi-discomfitures.

They re-teach purple and unsullen blue.

The wispy soils go. And uncertain

Half-havings have they clarified to sures.

In Little Rock they know

Not answering the telephone is a way of rejecting life,

That it is our business to be bothered, is our business

To cherish bores or boredom, be polite

To lies and love and many-faceted fuzziness.

I scratch my head, massage the hate-I-had.

I blink across my prim and pencilled pad.

The saga I was sent for is not down.

Because there is a puzzle in this town.

The biggest News I do not dare

Telegraph to the Editor's chair:

"They are like people everywhere."

The angry Editor would reply

In hundred harryings of Why.

And true, they are hurling spittle, rock,

Garbage and fruit in Little Rock.

And I saw coiling storm a-writhe

On bright madonnas.  And a scythe

Of men harassing brownish girls.

(The bows and barrettes in the curls

And braids declined away from joy.)

I saw a bleeding brownish boy. . . .

The lariat lynch-wish I deplored.

The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.