Uneasy Alliances: Gwendolyn Brooks, Ebony, and Whiteness

Abstract

Although Gwendolyn Brooks and Ebony magazine emerged from the same Chicago neighborhood and published their first volumes in 1945, previous critics have avoided linking America’s first black Pulitzer Prize winner with its first black picture magazine. At first glance this dissociation seems fair enough. Many of Brooks’s best-known poems give searing depictions of South Side poverty and scathing critiques of the white beauty standard. By contrast, the covers and lead stories of postwar Ebony featured wealthy entrepreneurs and glamorous celebrities, while several of its advertisements promoted skin bleachers and hair straighteners. Yet despite such obvious differences, their cultural proximity invites us to reconsider the poet in light of the popular magazine. Brooks appeared in several issues and knew key people on Ebony’s staff . The editors recommended her debut volume, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), in a promotion for the Negro Digest Bookshop. The magazine’s first photographs of Brooks accompanied 1949 articles about back poets and the magazine’s open house for its new building. Although Brooks’s postwar presence in the magazine never matched that of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, she did appear as a noted writer and minor celebrity.¹