The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) is an award-winning Black poet whose work over seven decades shows the evolving influence of Black liberation struggles on Black artists. “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed,” originally published in 1960 in Brooks’s The Bean-Eaters, is a narrative poem in which Rudolph Reed, a Black man who moves his family to an all-white neighborhood, dies defending his family from racists. “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed” reflects Brooks’s increasing focus on matters of racial justice and civil rights during the 1960s, when many Black artists re-assessed their role in Black politics and culture. Using ballad form—a narrative genre that relies on four-line stanzas, regular meter, and rhyme—Brooks shows the heroic, sometimes futile efforts of Black people to live out the American Dream.

Content Warning: This study guide references racism and includes discussion of racist language and violence.

Poet Biography

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, to a working-class family that moved to Chicago in one of the first 20th-century waves of the Great Migration, the mass movement of Black Americans to the cities in the Northeast and Midwest. Brooks showed promise as a poet early on.