Gwendolyn Brooks: The Oracle of Bronzeville

4532 S Greenwood Avenue (Kenwood)

On June 7, 2018, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame joined sculptor Margot McMahon in dedicating her sculpture project, The Oracle of Bronzeville. It resides in Gwendolyn Brooks Park, which is less than a mile from Gwendolyn Brooks’s childhood home at 4332 S. Champlain. The dedication ceremony, across the street at Kenwood United, and the unveiling in the park, capped an incredible journey to create and install this monumental work of public art. It would become just the second portrait statue of a woman and the first of a Black poet in any Chicago park. A luminous lineup of speakers articulated and amplified the significance of this moment, and of Brooks’s incredible contributions to Chicago. The Rev. Lisa M. Goods, Mike Puican, Ydalmi Noriega, Kelly Norman Ellis, Angela Jackson, Alderman Sophia King, and Haki Madhubuti all delivered respectful and powerful remarks about the woman and this new statue that would serve as a permanent tribute to her. The incredible youth group APG performed two of Brooks’s poems. At the unveiling itself, Nora Brooks Blakely spoke about her mom before reading a selection of her poetry, and Margot gave her own stirring remarks.

Brooks was raised and educated on the South Side, taught at several local colleges, and set much of her poetry in the city. With the publication of A Street in Bronzeville in 1945, Brooks won a Guggenheim Fellowship, became one of Mademoiselle’s “Ten Young Women of the Year,” and generally triggered an avalanche of praise that would continue unabated until her death. With Annie Allen, in 1950, Brooks became the first African-American to capture a Pulitzer Prize; she was poet laureate of Illinois and the United States; she was named National Endowment for the Arts’ Jefferson Lecturer; is a member of the National Women’s Hall of Fame; and has four Illinois schools and a library named in her honor. In conjunction with her 80th birthday in 1997, Mayor Richard Mr. Daley declared Gwendolyn Brooks Week, at which 80 performers and writers from around the world presented her gifts.

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