Parks, of course, came to widespread attention in December 1955 thanks to her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, when she resisted racial segregation on a local bus and refused to give up her seat for a white passenger. 1943) is a well-known African-American poet and activist, who has written about one of the most significant Civil Rights activists, Rosa Parks, on several occasions (including writing a book for younger readers, Rosa, all about her). Instead, it can be read as a poem about freedom and isolation in more general terms (although personally we think it benefits from having its specific context borne in mind). There are obvious parallels here between African American women in the United States and white American women, but Angelou does not reduce her poem to such a straightforward equivalence. The free bird has no need of song, but the caged bird sings because it is not free. This poem, contrasting the free bird with the caged bird, perhaps owes a debt to William Blake: Angelou’s reference to a ‘bird that stalks / down his narrow cage / can seldom see through / his bars of rage’ evokes Blake’s famous couplet ‘A Robin Redbreast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage.’ But the more immediate link is with Angelou’s own work, and her 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. ‘Coal’ is black, of course, but if you put it under enough pressure, it can produce diamonds. Her poem ‘Coal’ is one of her most frequently anthologised, and sees Lorde harnessing the rage she feels when, for instance, she sees white people’s attitudes to black Americans. Lorde (1934-92) was a self-described ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.’ The ‘warrior’ is as important as the other words. This is the title poem from Lorde’s 1976 collection of the same name, which was her first collection published by a major publisher. How do they view themselves, she wonders? This poem attempts to give them a voice – and in doing so, reflects the new phenomenon of the 1950s: the teenager. Gwendolyn Brooks built upon this new tradition for this 1959 poem, which was inspired by seeing a group of young boys in a pool hall when they should have been in school. In the 1920s, it was African American poets like Langston Hughes who pioneered a new kind of poetry – drawing on jazz rhythms and African-American Vernacular – during the Harlem Renaissance. The mother sends her daughter to church, thinking she will be safe from harm and trouble there tragically, the church becomes another target of white nationalist hate. Taking the form of a dialogue between a young child and her mother, the poem highlights the racial prejudice – and the real threats to their lives – that African Americans faced during Civil Rights-era America.
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