21 pages • 42 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksThe Blackstone Rangers
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: 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).
In the year after attending the revue, Brooks began offering poetry workshops to the Blackstone Rangers, moving from offering instruction on traditional Western forms of poetry to facilitating workshops on whatever the Blackstone Rangers wanted to write. Of the workshops, she says, “I started a workshop for some of the hardest Black criminals who were part of a group called the Blackstone Rangers, and got to know some of the things that motivated them, and wrote on this subject in a poem that I think is very well written” (Hawkins, B. Denise. “An Evening with Gwendolyn Brooks.” James Madison University. 1994). That poem is “The Blackstone Rangers.”
During the brief time Brooks ran workshops for the Blackstone Rangers, the gang was already consolidating territory and engaged in short-lived collaborations with civic leaders that made them one of the more powerful gangs in the city; at the time, it seemed that these partnerships might keep peace in the city and forge a new path for effective Black power in an urban setting. That hopeful moment was short-lived.
They were well on their way to becoming the Black P(eace) Stone Nation, an organized crime group that the United States Department of Justice described in 2008 as “one of the largest and most violent associations of street gangs in the United States, [consisting] of seven highly structured street gangs with a single leader and a common culture” (“Appendix B: National-Level Street, Prison, and Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Profiles.” United States Department of Justice. 2008). The poem reflects Brooks’s sense of the Blackstone Rangers as people full of potential but stymied by their circumstances. Her poem also presages the increasingly violent but disciplined consolidation of the group into a “Nation on no map” (Line 17).
Political Context: Black Nationalism
Brooks’s work in this poem and others in subsequent years was her response to the call of the Black Power Movement. Black Power was a Black liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, during which influential people in the movement encouraged Black artists to give “raw artistic expression displaying the realities of African Americans” (“Black Power.” National Archives. 2021). The movement was nationalist; that is, it encouraged Black people to create their own art, institutions, and political organizations; doing so would allow Black Americans to create a Black-imagined community that would ideally give way to a tangible Black community or nation.
While the aims of the Black nationalism were aspirational, they grew out of a sense of despair, as the early legal victories of the Civil Rights Movement did little to improve the lives of many Black Americans. That despair was most evident in cities where all the resources—aside from law enforcement and government agencies that surveilled Black communities—flowed to white enclaves and suburbs that sprang up, as white people who could afford to leave increasingly diverse cities did so.
Unlike many cities where such conditions created slums and racially segregated inner cities, Chicago had a long history of Black participation in government. A political machine, one dominated by white Mayor Richard M. Daley over three decades, ensured that Black political figures exercised a certain degree of power so long as they delivered votes for Daley. As “The Blackstone Rangers” makes clear, having Black leaders with political power—people associated with “the downtown thing” (Line 10)—doesn’t translate to improvements in the lives of Black people in Chicago. In “The Blackstone Rangers,” Brooks paints a picture of what Black Power looks like as groups like the Rangers attempt to improvise it in the now.
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