What’s in a name? Well if you forget someone’s name you usually get embarrassed.  
Dale Carnegie wrote that a person’s name was the most important thing to them. I 
wouldn’t go that far. Many a person has died defending the honor of their name. 
Business people often put their names on products and hope that people who like
them will like the product. 

Lets talk about Gwedolyn Brooks: (The following is excerpted from a website about 
Ms. Brooks). 

 Gwendolyn Brooks was an American poet and novelist, a leading poet of the
post-World War II era and an important figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 
1960s and 1970s.
 
 As an infant, Gwendolyn Brooks moved with her parents, David and Keziah Wims
Brooks, to Chicago's South Side, where she has resided ever since. Brooks was 
educated at Chicago public schools and Wilson Junior College. The major early 
influence on Brooks's literary career was her mother, who had Brooks giving 
dramatic recitals at the age of four. Largely through her mother's urging, the
teenage Brooks met the leading black writers James Weldon Johnson and
Langston Hughes, who encouraged her to write poetry. By age 16, Brooks 
had already published poetry in the Chicago Defender, the leading African 
American newspaper of that time.
 
Brooks's writing further developed as she participated in the vibrant literary 
scene of the South Side during the late 1930s and early 1940s, which included 
such important black writers as Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Theodore
Ward, Margaret Danner, Arna Bontemps, and Frank Marshall Davis. Inez 
Cunningham Stark's poetry workshop at the South Side Community Art Center
in the early 1940s was particularly important in developing Brooks's writing skills.
Brooks's poems began to appear in such leading journals and anthologies of
the time as Negro Story and Edward Seaver's Cross Section series. During this
period, Brooks also won many prizes and fellowships, including two Guggenheim
Fellowships. Brooks's first collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, appeared 
in 1945. A second book of poetry, Annie Allen, was published in 1949, earning 
Brooks the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950 — the first time an African American
won the award.

Brooks's early collections are exciting mixtures of modernist treatments of traditional
literary forms, such as the sonnet and ballad (heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot) along
with more popular African American forms after the manner of Langston Hughes. 
Despite these and other influences, Brooks created a unique poetic voice that
grappled with issues of art, identity, race, gender, and the relation between literature 
and popular culture more powerfully than any other poet in the immediate post-World
War II era. Brooks further investigated these concerns in her single novel, Maud Martha
(1953), a series of loosely connected sketches about a young African American
woman from the South Side.

With the upsurge of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s, Brooks's work became
increasingly engaged with the events of the African American struggle for freedom. Her 
1960 collection of poems, The Bean Eaters, contains poems about the 1955 murder of 
14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, lynching, and the integration of schools in Little Rock,
Arkansas. While retaining much in common with her early style, Brooks's poetry became
much more direct during this period. This directness and more overt focus on the
immediate conditions and events of the African American community became even more 
pronounced after Brooks attended a black writer's conference at Fisk University in 1967.
At this conference, Brooks encountered leading Black Arts Movement writers, such as 
Amiri Baraka, who greatly influenced her. After the conference, Brooks became the black
writer of the earlier generation most prominently identified with the Black Arts Movement. 
This affiliation was seen almost immediately in the 1968 collection, In the Mecca 
("the Mecca" referring to a South Side apartment building) which included poems to
Malcolm X, slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and the Blackstone Rangers, a politicized 
Chicago street gang that became part of the Black Power Movement.

Brooks retained this political engagement in her work until her recent death, an engagement
seen not only in her poetry, but also in her decision to use African American-run publishing
houses rather than larger commercial publishers. In addition to her poetry and her novel, 
Brooks wrote two autobiographical works.

There is a lot in a name. Gwedolyn Brook’s Middle School is a legacy for a poet, a scholar,
an activist, a humanitarian, a teacher, a role model, a woman and an African American. 
I am sure Mr. Emerson will not mind if his name is removed from the school. He probably
would be honored to have such a replacement. We all move on. Emerson will be
remembered, too. There are probably a thousand schools named after him. 

There is a great deal in a name…Gwendolyn Brook’s Middle School…. it’s a good name.

Robert Milstein
Oak Park, Ill