| Transforming Words/Revolutionizing Verses: Four Poets of the American Civil Rights Movement focuses on the literary, political, and cultural impact the American Civil Rights Movement has had on traditionally marginalized racial and ethnic groups. My fundamental approach involves examining literary and cultural productions which offer themselves to an interpretation within a framework of rights: the Civil Rights Movement in specific, and human rights in general. My primary intention is to explicate and historicize the corpus of poetry written during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s by Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker, and Michael S. Harper that reflects ideologies of the Civil Rights Movement. The body of literature I examine also illuminates many of the strategies, conflicts, and triumphs of the Movement. |
