"The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock," by Gwendolyn Brooks

First, a few notes:

1) Founded in 1905, the Chicago Defender was one of the most important African American newspapers in the 1950s. In this poem, Brooks imagines the point of view of a reporter sent by the Defender to cover the story of the controversy in Little Rock, Arkansas, over the desegregation of the Central High School, three years after Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ordered desegregation “with all deliberate speed.”

2) The poem begins with a portrait of everyday Little Rock, including ordinary, banal details of life (particularly the lives of white citizens in the city), the “many, tight, and small concerns” — and then closes by contrasting these details with the harrowing events surrounding the “Little Rock Nine,” the nine teenagers who attempted to enter the school on that first fateful, violent day. A crowd of about a thousand people encircled the school (we might call them the “Little Rock Thousand”), jeering and spitting and throwing things at the students, initially barring them from entry. As a result, President Eisenhower ordered federal troops to escort the teens into the building.

3) Overall, the poem is a meditation on what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” the way our ordinary, everyday lives can and do (wittingly and unwittingly) intertwine with violence and cruelty, and that people who “are like people everywhere” sometimes do dreadful things.

4) “Lorna Doones” are buttery cookies. “Barcarolle” is a form of singing. “Johann” refers to Johann Sebastian Bach, performed in concert at a public park. The “saga I was sent for” is the desegregation controversy itself. And the students are compared to “bright madonnas” (that is, to suffering royalty), and the angry crowds are compared to the Roman mob along Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows, the road to the cross.

”The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

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.

+ Gwendolyn Brooks