Reflections on the BMRC Community Visit to the Gwendolyn Brooks Collection

On April 23, 2025, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium gathered a group of twenty people representing local cultural heritage organizations, academic libraries and archives and graduate students on a community trip to visit the Gwendolyn Brooks Collection held by the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The event was inspired by the call from the family of Gwendolyn Brooks to hold events to celebrate 75 years of Gwendolyn Brooks publishing and then winning the Pulitzer Prize for her book of poetry, Annie Allen. The BMRC trip was named Wherever They May Be, after the Brooks poem, “ Primer for Blacks,” in which the poet wrote:

The word Black

has geographic power,

pulls everybody in:

Blacks here—

Blacks there—

Blacks wherever they may be.

In keeping with that spirit, the BMRC chartered a bus with Southside Tours and set out to Urbana Champaign. The Brooks Collection “contains materials that were collected by the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks throughout her life and professional career including correspondence; poetry and prose drafts; interview transcripts; notebooks and loose notes and jottings; photos and scrapbooks; drawings; calendars and diet books; public engagements files and teaching materials; awards, honorary degrees, and doctoral hoods; newspapers and news clippings; A/V media; realia; and ephemera (RBML, UIUC).”

The BMRC groups was generously hosted by the staff of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who showed us the exhibit on Brooks currently on display in the library, “We are each other’s harvest”: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Formation of the Black Literary Canon and provided a lecture contextualizing Brooks within the realm of (Black) American poetry. Later, the group was allowed to look at key materials from the collection that were brought into the reading room.

As the BMRC group was composed of people with varying levels of exposure and experience with archives, ranging from professionally trained archivists to those with no prior knowledge or experience of archives, the hands-on engagement with the Brooks’ papers was dynamic and produced a myriad of experiences and observations. One person from the non-profit sector asked, “Why should I care about archives? What do they have to offer me?” Later, he was shown materials from the Brooks collection that relate to his interest in cookbooks and traditional Black recipes. Another person who is writing a paper for a graduate seminar on the Black Arts Movement said that they realized after looking at some of the collection that they had “only touched the surface” with regards to their coverage of Brooks in their paper. Others were struck by the depth of the collection, the extent to which Brooks documented and kept the records of her life and the extent to which the records demonstrate her connections to important Black institutions and artists of her time. One artist was surprised to find a letter from the artist and sculptor Richard Hunt in the collection.

The BMRC was happy to sponsor this trip to the Gwendolyn Brooks Collection at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library as a way to remember her legacy, and renew and nurture the connection between her poetry and the people of the City of Chicago.