Centenary …

… Remembering The Great Poet Gwendolyn Brooks At 100 : Code Switch : NPR. (Hat tip, G. E. Reutter.)

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kan., but she moved to Chicago with her parents, Keziah and David, when she was 5 weeks old. The Brooks family joined thousands of black families that were streaming into the city's South Side, part of the Great Migration that would transform many large American cities north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Segregation confined the new arrivals to the South Side, where they created parallel institutions to the white ones that excluded them. Young Gwen came from a family of readers and book lovers, and announced early on that she intended to become a poet.