The Blackstone Rangers

“Seventh Street” by Jean Toomer (1923)

Content Warning: This poem includes offensive racial slurs for Black people.

Like “The Blackstone Rangers,” “Seventh Street” relies on experimentation with form and rhythm to capture Black urban identity, including wonder and horror at the spectacle of violence that sometimes occurs in those spaces. Toomer’s work is associated with the Harlem Renaissance, showing the enduring importance of the city to Black representation starting in the early 20th century.

“We Real Cool” by Brooks (1960)

“We Real Cool,” which Brooks included in her 1960 collection The Bean Eaters, includes similar subjects—Black urban youths carving out their own identities in the city. This poem is in first-person plural rather than the third-person points-of-view in “The Blackstone Rangers,” a choice that emphasizes the importance of being part of a collective.

The young people in the poem are engaged in play and rebellious acts; the turn in the last line to talking about their deaths is a shift in tone that shares more with the tone in “The Blackstone Rangers.” Comparing and contrasting the poems allows one to see the evolution of Brooks’s perspective on representing Black urban identity and the mood in Black urban communities.

“Our People II” by CM Burroughs (2017)

Burroughs’s evocative poem was included in a 2017 special number of Poetry that  celebrates the influence of Brooks. Burroughs’s poem, which ends with the line “Mecca’s everywhere now” (Line 17), suggests that the Black urban identity Brooks chronicled in her poems is now central to Black culture and Black expression as a whole.

The speaker in the poem celebrates the resilience and joy of that culture, while the speaker in “The Blackstone Rangers” feels ambivalent about the future.