Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950

1845    The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is published.

1848    The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave is published.

1852    Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

1853    William Brown publishes the novel Clotel: A Tale of Southern States.

1860    Abraham Lincon, a Republican Senator from Illinois, is elected president.

1861    Harriet Jacobs publishes Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

            The American Civil War begins, lasting until 1865.

1863    The Emancipation Proclamation: halfway through the Civil War, President Lincoln formally declares the 3.5 million Black slaves in the secessionist Confederate states free.

1865    The 13^th Amendment to the Constitution makes slavery illegal across the country.

1868    The 14^th Amendment to the Constitution grants all citizens equal protection under the law.

1885    The Home Insurance Building, the world’s first skyscraper, is erected in Chicago.

1890    The University of Chicago is founded.

1893    Paul Laurence Dunbar publishes his first collection of poetry, Oak and Ivy.

            Chicago hosts the World’s Columbian Exhibition.

1896    In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that racial segregation and Jim Crow laws passed in southern states since the end of the Civil War do not violate the Constitution under the “separate but equal” doctrine.

1900    Theodore Dreiser publishes the novel Sister Carrie.

1901    Booker T. Washington publishes Up from Slavery.

1903    W.E.B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk.

1908    The Springfield race riot: in Springfield, Illinois, a mob of 5,000 whites attack local Blacks and kill 17.

1909    The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is created; W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the main cofounders. The Crisis, the NAACP’s official magazine, is created the next year.

1912    The National Urban League, a civil rights organization is created.

1912    James Weldon Johnson publishes the novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

            Poetry: A Magazine of Verse is founded by Harriet Monroe in Chicago.

1914    The Little Review is founded by Margaret Anderson in Chicago.

1916    Carl Sandburg publishes the collection Chicago Poems.

            The Great Migration begins.

1917    Gwendolyn Brooks is born in Topeka, Kansas on June 7, to David and Keziah Brooks. Five weeks later, the Brookses settle in Chicago.

1918    GB’s younger brother Raymond is born.

1919    The Red Summer: racist riots erupt in Chicago and other places across the U.S., killing hundreds of Black people.

            Sherwood Anderson publishes the collection of short stories Winesburg, Ohio.

1922    The Jamaican writer Claude McKay publishes the collection of poems Harlem Shadows.

1923    The literary journal Opportunity is created.

            Jean Toomer publishes the novel Cane.

            GB goes to school at Forrestville Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side, before attending the integrated Hyde Park high school.

1925    Alan Locke publishes the New Negro anthology.

            Countee Cullen publishes the poem “Heritage”.

1926    Langston Hughes publishes the collection of poems The Weary Blues.

1927    James Weldon Johnson publishes the collection of poems God’s Trombones.

            Richard Wright moves from Memphis, Tennessee, to Chicago.

1928    Nella Larsen publishes the novels Quicksand and Passing.

1929    The Great Depression begins.

1930    James Gentry coins the phrase Bronzeville for the Black neighbourhood in Chicago’s South Side.

            GB publishes her first poem, “Eventide,” in the children’s magazine American Childhood.

            GB starts publishing poems in “Lights and Shadows,” the poetry column in the Chicago Defender.

1932    Franlin Delano Roosevelt is elected President and launches the New Deal.

1935    GB graduates from high school. She attends Woodrow Wilson Junior College for two years.

            The Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency, launches the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a federal government project aiming at providing jobs for out-of-work writers and to develop a history and overview of the U.S., by state, cities and other jurisdictions.

1936    Richard Wright launches the South Side Writers Group.

1937    Nora Zeale Hurston publishes the novel Their Eyes were Watching God.

            GB starts working for the “spiritual adviser” E.N. French at the Mecca building.

            GB joins the NAACP Youth Council in Chicago, and becomes its publicity director.

1939    GB marries Henry Lowington Blakely Jr. They have two children: Henry Lowington Blakely III and Nora Brooks Blakely.

1940    Richard Wright publishes the novel Native Son.

1941    GB starts attending the poetry workshop organized by Inez Cunningham Stark.

1941    The U.S. enters World War Two; some 16 million men and women serve in the American armed forces throughout the duration of the war, including 1 million African-Americans, among them Raymond M. Brooks, GB’s little brother.

1942    Margaret Walker publishes the collection of poems For My People.

            Melvin B. Tolson publishes the collection of poems Rendezvous with America.

1943    GB is awarded the poetry award from the Midwestern Writer’s Conference.

1945    Richard Wright publishes his autobiography, Black Boy.

            GB has two poems – “Gay Chaps” and “And Still Do I Keep My Look, My Identity” – accepted by Poetry magazine for the first time.

            In August, GB’s first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville, is published by Harper & Row.

1946    GB is awarded a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and receives a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.

1948    GB starts publishing book reviews for the Chicago Daily News, later the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Times.

1949    James Baldwin published the essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.”

            GB publishes her second book of verse, Annie Allen.

            GB is invited at Howard University.

1950    GB publishes the essay “Poets Who Are Negroes,” in the journal Phylon.

            Annie Allen is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

            In October, GB is invited at Atlanta University; this is her first experience of the Deep South.

1952    Ralph Ellison publishes his first and only novel, Invisible Man.

1953    James Baldwin publishes his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain.

            GB publishes the novella Maud Martha.

1954    In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously puts an end to the “separate but equal” doctrine going back to Plessy v. Ferguson, and rules that state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.

1955    Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Chicago, is murdered by two white men while visiting family in Mississippi; the local jury finds the two men not guilty in the trial that follows.

1956    GB publishes Bronzeville Boys and Girls, a collection of children’s poetry.

1957    The Little Rock crisis: nine African American students are prevented from enrolling in the racially segregated Little Rock Central High School, in Arkansas, until President Eisenhower federalizes the National Guard to protect them and facilitate their integration.

1959    Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun opens on Broadway.

1960    GB publishes the poetry collection The Bean Eaters.

1962    GB starts teaching American literature and creative writing at the University of Chicago, later at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College New York, and the University of Wisconsin.

            Carl Sandburg becomes poet laureate of Illinois.

1963    GB’s Selected Poems are published by Harper & Row.

            On August 28, 250,000 people participate to the NAACP’s march on Washington. Martin Luther King delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

            Medgar Evers, a NAACP leader in Mississippi, is murdered.

            President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

1964    Ralph Ellison publishes the collection of essays Shadow and Act.

            The Civil Rights Act, which outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and nationality, is enacted.

1965    The Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, is enacted.

            Malcolm X is assassinated.

            Race riots erupt in the Black ghetto of Watts, in Los Angeles, California, causing 34 deaths and over $40 million in property damage, which makes it the most destructive riot until 1992.

            LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal launch the Black Arts movement.

            GB participates to the “Conference on the Negro Writer in the United States” organized by the University of California, alongside LeRoi Jones and other major African-American writers.

1967    Riots erupt in Newark, New Jersey, causing 26 deaths, and marking the beginning of the “long, hot summer of 1967,” when over 150 riots erupted across the United States, fuelled by anger in African-American ghettoes about police brutality, racial inequality, and poverty.

            A riot erupts in Detroit, Michigan, causing 43 deaths.

            GB participates to the Black Writers’ Conference at Nashville’s Fisk University, alongside LeRoi Jones, now Amiri Baraka, and others.

            GB begins a poetry workshop in Chicago with a local street gang, the Blackstone Rangers, and promising young poets like Sonia Sanchez, Don L. Lee and Nikki Giovanni.

1968    GB succeeds Carl Sandburg as poet laureate of Illinois, a position she holds until her death.

            GB publishes the poetry collection In the Mecca.

1969    GB’s new poetry collection Riot is published by Broadside Press, a small, Detroit-based company.

1970    GB publishes the poetry collection Family Pictures.

            Toni Morrison publishes her first novel, The Bluest Eye.

1971    GB publishes the poetry collection Aloneness.

1972    GB publishes the first volume of her autobiography, Report From Part One.

1974    GB publishes the poetry collection The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves.

1975    GB publishes the poetry collection Beckonings.

1976    GB becomes the first African-American woman inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

1978    Keziah Brooks, GB’s mother, dies after a long illness through which her daughter has nursed her.

1981    GB publishes the poetry collection To Disembark.

1982    Alice Walker publishes the novel The Color Purple.

1983    GB publishes the poetry collection Very Young Poets.

1984    August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom opens on Broadway.

1985    GB is appointed Library of Congress consultant in poetry.

1986    GB publishes the poetry collection The Near-Johannesburg Boy.

1987    GB publishes the poetry collection Blacks.

1987    GB publishes the poetry collections Winnie and Gottschalk and the Grande Tarentelle.

1989    GB receives a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

1990    The Gwendolyn Brooks Chair in Black Literature and Creative Writing is established at Chicago State University.

1994    GB receives a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation.

            GB is selected by the National Endowment of the Humanities as its Jefferson lecturer.

1995    GB publishes the second volume of her autobiography, Report From Part Two.

            GB receives the National Medal of Arts award.

1996    GB’s husband, Henry, dies.

2000    On December 3, GB dies of cancer at the age of 83. She is buried in Lincoln Cemetery, in Blue Island, Illinois.

2003    GB’s last poetry collection, In Montgomery, is published posthumously.