Lucille Clifton interviewed by Hilary Holladay (Hilary Holladay), A Historical Footnote to Consider Only When All Else Fails, Playing by Ear, Praying for Rain: The Poetry of James Baldwin, Brooks’s Prosody: Three Sermons on the Warpland, Remembering civil rights history, when ‘words meant everything’, A son’s poetic tribute to his father’s fight for civil rights.
A group of high school students in Little Rock, Arkansas—“the Little Rock Nine”—enroll in Little Rock Central High School, prompting a mob of white protesters to harass, threaten, and throw stones at them as they attempt to enter the school (1957). It is Monday, I am twelve years old, summer still feel like summer to me... Ernest Green. Born Michael Weaver in 1951 on the east side of Baltimore, he was the first in his family to go to college. Civil rights activist Medgar Evers is assassinated (June 1963). Copyright © Afaa Michael Weaver, "The Little Rock 9" from A Hard The Civil Rights Act is enacted (July 1964). about the little girls who got killed while we was 1968 was pivotal in the civil rights movement, marked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the widespread riots that followed, and the passage of a new Civil Rights Act. the soles of safety shoes of men and womentapping metal plated walkways to work stations. of the arms, what a word will do when you know President Kennedy is assassinated (November 1963). I only had one white teacher, she was named my daddy a big shot on the Avenue He was also accepted into Brown's writing program that spring. She never told us her dreams, when we asked her, she just said we would know, when the moon turned over three times and ghosts, rose up out of the sea. I only had one white teacher, she was named. I got a quarter for your ten dollar bill, Racist housing policies, job discrimination, abuse by law enforcement, and negative stereotypes in popular culture pervaded all regions of the United States. Born Michael Weaver in 1951 on the east side of Baltimore, he was the first in his family to go to college. and when I come home from church His full-length play Rosa was produced in 1993 at Venture Theater in Philadelphia. Fourteen-year old Emmett Till is brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman (1955); the two men accused of his murder are acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury later that year. You would swim and suddenly come with thismuck harvest that made you sick, or if you werethe more mischievous of us chase the rest with it,throw it at us, threaten to put it in the girls' hairwhile no one seemed to want to know who did it,who was a rogue and unclean swimmer in herewith everyone else fresh from a bath at homewith soap and some thoughts of sweetness. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. This garden, this drama, this danceof light and wind on what dares to grow, whathas the ambition to work for what it calls life,to struggle while human eyes are oblivious to the price of what grows here, unaware it is the price they pay, the work it takes to stay,to be a worker where workers are allowed. Two of the most regaled poets of the 21st century, Afaa Michael Weaver and Rich Michelson, will be reading together at the Katharine Cornell … Weaver’s poetry, as these three poems beautifully exemplify, explore questions of work and meaning, the individual and society, and the socio-political and spiritual worlds through which Weaver has traveled in his own personal journey. Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated while campaigning for president (June 1968). If you tell, you will see the wounded everywhere,shuffling legions, the murdered souls of children. I am one of the outcast, brave nine. like me will ever need in a city where ... Afaa Michael Weaver (2014) ... Michael S. Harper (1970) February 12, 1963. I sit and sew word onto word when the millis down, I study the invocation and wait to see, a poem come out from the skylight in the meshof corrugated metal walls, a web of language. If you tell, poets will call it marketing,a ploy to get ahead in the game. His tenth and newest book of poetry is The Plum Flower Dance, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Weaver has straddled different worlds throughout his life: the world of his family in Baltimore; the intellectual world of New England, where he now lives; the working class; and the middle class. Little Rock Nine, group of African American high-school students who challenged racial segregation in the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas. my cousins take my model car shelf down,
Throughout those years in factories, Weaver was writing. inside some dream. The Supreme Court Loving v. Virginia decision strikes down prohibitions on interracial marriage (1967). His short fiction appears in multiple anthologies, including Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present (Little, Brown, 1997), edited by Gloria Naylor.Weaver took the name Afaa in 1997, after the death of his first child; the name, given to him by the Nigerian playwright Tess Onwueme, is an Ibo word meaning “oracle. These buttons on birds of metal rising from ashes are lives of men and womenwho went into jobs, who never came home, who came home and died for pipe dreams,or dreams of a country, the dust bowl liftingup from starving families in Grapes of Wrath,the shuffling armies of black sharecroppersleaving the South for the North’s harsh ways,under waves of assaults… in Kunming I sit in a Muslim restaurantwith a poet who gave me the Koran in Chinese,while around me folk celebrate the end of a dayof work, sitting in a park, listening to the erhu,its eloquent moaning where Yu Jian sings aboutworking in a metal factory, while Wang Xiaoniworked on a farm later to be the first woman to write after reeducation…what do we knowwhen we die, when our poetry writes history? Brown v. Board of Education; sign My life, I was the one against the hoard. (Note: The following also includes poems that address civil rights events beyond the 1960s.). standing in lines with protest signs, dogs And black oh yes, In 1865, Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery in the United States. under angels' wings beating a prayer in a place with no night, no day, no palladium of lies. just like my aunt from South Carolina, I was so full of hallelujah on the inside, standing in lines with protest signs, dogs, barking all around, so I make sure I sound, in the middle of tomorrow when it still be.
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