In 1966, teenage Horace “Turk” Hazelton published a poem called “Going Home” in the inaugural issue of Chicory, a Baltimore community poetry magazine. Mentored by the magazine’s founding editor, Sam Cornish, a published poet who became the Poet Laureate of Boston, Turk’s poem details an encounter with the police as he is walking home late at night.Footnote 1 One cop accuses Turk of trying to hit him and then pulls out his gun.
run he said so i saw
now how it was going to be for me
that night boy if you run i going to blow your head off run he said
he kicked me pushed me with his gun then he saw when i was not
going to run he put away his gun then i run.Footnote 2
Five decades later, then-teenage Baltimore resident A’niya Taylor memorialized “Summer 2020” in The Space Between, a poetry chapbook published by community press Charm Voices of Baltimore Youth. Her poem about a neighborhood block party in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic could seem entirely of its historical moment thanks to its image of a police officer hovering overhead in a helicopter using a loudspeaker to tell the partygoers to maintain six feet of social distance. But the poem’s tragic turn reminds us that this was also the summer of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, a death with a heartbreakingly familiar rhythm that played out in cities across the nation.
On July first
A few blocks up from me
A man was having a behavioral crisis
And The police show up and shoot him in his home
Because isn’t it so much easier to try and kill problem then fix it
They said that they saw him with a gun
And Shot him multiple times
I wonder if they knew he didn’t wear a bullet proof vest like them.Footnote 3
The juxtaposition of Turk and Taylor’s stories, happening decades apart in the same city, suggests a long history of police in Baltimore threatening, surveilling, and killing Black people. For the ones who escape with their lives, like Hazelton, and the neighbors, like Taylor, trauma follows. Because they survive, their stories are often forgotten. Hazelton and Taylor refuse to abide by this forgetting. Instead, they speak through the medium of poetry written in the music of the vernacular and circulated through community-based publications.
Since 2018, the Chicory Revitalization Project (CRP), of which I am a co-founder, has used the vernacular poetry published in Chicory as the centerpiece of a public humanities project. Through poetry workshops, public events, a traveling exhibition, social media, and a new magazine, we have developed a theory of poetry as emotional history that allows for intergenerational dialogue. Inspired by public poetry projects such as June Jordan’s Poetry for the People and the youth poet laureate program, our efforts encourage creative expression but only after first examining poetry as a historical document around which we can have conversations about change over time—or its absence. Explored more fully in our forthcoming book, Baltimore’s Black Arts Then & Now: Behind the Scenes of a Collaborative Public Humanities Project, this article explores our method, arguing that place-based art, like the poetry in Chicory, is a powerful tool for public humanists to connect with the public on an emotional level and build toward intergenerational dialogue about the past.
Vernacular poetry and emotional history
In the mid-1960s, two movements unexpectedly converged. In 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson declared the War on Poverty, he accompanied his promise with an infusion of funding that flowed into urban areas nationwide. A year later, the assassination of Malcolm X catalyzed the Black Arts Movement, a cultural movement of Black artist-activists seeking to create art for and by members of the Black community. While the War on Poverty represented liberalism’s apex, seeing the American system as essentially sound and simply needing minimal changes to bring alienated Black people into it, the Black Arts Movement prioritized liberation, or the empowerment of Black communities for their own benefit, critiquing both liberalism and capitalism.
These movements intersected in Baltimore in Chicory. The Enoch Pratt Free Library was awarded money from the local War on Poverty agency to improve literacy and help Black residents find jobs. Under the management of two librarians, Evelyn Levy and Thelma Bell, these funds extended library services into Baltimore’s Black working-class neighborhoods (Figure 1). Cornish, hired as a community liaison, created a magazine that straddled these perspectives. On one hand, he made sure that it appealed to liberal funders who wanted to hear “young voices from the Black ghetto,” as the subtitle of the anthology of Chicory poems published in 1969 phrased it. Simultaneously, though, he made the magazine a space for working-class Black self-expression by implementing a policy of not editing submissions. Rather than try to “improve” the authors’ work, it was either accepted for publication or not. This core tenet merged with some of the ideas motivating the Black Arts Movement, which promoted artistic expression by non-professionals, collaboration between professional artists and community members, and embraced vernacular language in literary works.Footnote 4 Or, as Cornish put it, Chicory would be a magazine for “people who don’t like to write but have something to say.”Footnote 5
In this photo, which graced the cover of Chicory’s March 1971 issue, a library employee talks to Baltimore residents next to the Enoch Pratt Free Library bookmobile, which brought library books and other materials to city neighborhoods. Originally funded with War on Poverty money, the bookmobile, like Chicory magazine, was intended to build bridges between this city institution and Black residents of Baltimore. Courtesy Enoch Pratt Free Library, Maryland’s State Library Resource Center.
Successfully managing the tensions between these diametrically opposed visions of the purpose of the public humanities allowed the magazine to become a vehicle for civic dialogue, a space for counternarratives of urban crisis, and a means of community empowerment for seventeen years. When I rediscovered Chicory, which had been archived at the Pratt library after it ceased publication in 1983, I realized it had been its own kind of public humanities project avant la lettre. As a historical record, it preserved the voices of those often excluded from archives: working-class, nonwhite, elderly, young, incarcerated, and othered.
That it does so in poetry is meaningful. Through its figurative language, all poetry crystallizes emotions in words. As poet Jon Sands asks, “if we’re to properly archive, we must ask ourselves not whether this is a great poem, but, rather, is this today’s poem?”Footnote 6 Poets, he argues, are “emotional historians,” who offer us a window into their moment in time through evocative language. For the CRP, the people’s poetry in Chicory is a unique kind of historical document. In ways different from newspaper articles, speeches, or even oral histories, Chicory’s poets capture the structure of feeling of their era, allowing us in the present to access it.
The vernacular language in Chicory makes it useful as a tool for public humanists. By vernacular, I mean that its writers use words, slang, dialect, and rhythms of speech common to a group that may be different than officially sanctioned language learned in school or seen in a newspaper. When university-based public humanists use poetry in their work, it tends to be canonical or, at least, professional. The Poetry in America project brings poetry to thousands of viewers through their online courses, which use video to “situate readers within the historical and cultural contexts of poems.”Footnote 7 Their democratization of poetry should be cheered, but it is noteworthy that the authors they feature are representatives of the pinnacle of poetic achievement who regularly appear in anthologies of the best poetry. Vernacular poetry equally offers us insight into a time and place but does so through language that may be more familiar and welcoming to audiences, especially young people.
Publishing vernacular poetry for Chicory’s editors was a political act that validated regular people’s language. Gloria Green raised this issue in her 1979 poem, “Black Poetry Does,” when she wondered how she should write as a Black poet.
should i lie & speak of roses growing by the trashcans in my backyard
or should i cry ova a
slanted body/dirty/drunk/dead on subway steps.Footnote 8
Evoking poet Amiri Baraka’s line, “poems are bullshit unless they are teeth or trees or lemons piled on a stair,” Green asserts that Black poetry must be rooted in lived experience, even if that experience is far from the beautiful images contained within canonical poetry. Using “ova” instead of “over” and connecting descriptors for a prone body with slash marks captures the sound and rhythm of speech. By “publish[ing] work that reflects the music of language in the inner city,” like Green’s poem, Chicory refused the narrow definition of poetry proffered by elite literary magazines and publishers.Footnote 9 Indeed, Baltimoreans did not even have to write down their words to have them be seen as poetry. The overheard snippets of conversation published as street chatter by the editors emphasized that everyday speaking could be art. Street chatter published in the July 1967 issue exemplifies this concept:
You don’t have to have any fancy words for me man just tell it like it is.
Two men on a street corner.Footnote 10
By publishing these poems and street chatter, Chicory turned what could have remained private acts of individual expression into ones of community solidarity. While the use of vernacular language in a publication that was supported by liberalism could easily position it as one more way in which Black linguistic creativity would be cannibalized by whiteness, it was also a political act that recognized, as James Baldwin wrote, that “people evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances.”Footnote 11 Language is group consciousness. In its pages, Chicory’s editors documented more than how people spoke. They captured how they understood their world.
Intergenerational dialogue
Chicory also became, within its issues and across them, a space of dialogue. Allowing contributors to write as they liked with no editorial mediation was its guiding principle; there was not one political point of view in the magazine. An issue might include work by devout Christians and Black nationalists who linked Christianity with slavery; men who lauded feminine modesty and women who advocated for their sexual desire. While it is impossible to know how any individual reader responded to these ideas, publishing and circulating them together suggested that they represented the breadth of community perspectives. As a “resonant text,” it also creates dialogue across time through the efforts of the CRP.Footnote 12 After rediscovering Chicory, I partnered with Pratt Library to digitize the magazine to make it more accessible to the public, allowing for wider circulation.Footnote 13 As a public historian, however, I knew that it was unlikely that many people would find the digitized collection unless there was an effort to show how it could resonate with them in the present, which led me to reach out to the youth writing organizations DewMore Baltimore and Writers in Baltimore Schools, teacher Patrick Oray, and former editors of the magazine. Together, in 2018, we named ourselves the CRP.
From our initial meeting, exploring intergenerational dialogue was central to our vision. Over the last two decades, public humanists have embraced dialogue or conversation as a method of democratic community engagement. Dialogue programs prioritize making connections between members of the public rather than transferring knowledge from an expert to an audience.Footnote 14 In doing so, they counter neoliberalism’s evisceration of the democratic public sphere by creating spaces where strangers can talk with each other.
CRP builds on this conception of public humanities dialogue. However, we describe our work as intergenerational dialogue to emphasize that the conversations we foster happen both in the present and with the past. Intergenerational usually describes interactions between young people and elders, such as in oral history projects where youth interview older people about historical events. When we created our traveling exhibition, Soul of the Butterfly: Chicory Magazine and Baltimore’s Black Arts Activism, the project embodied exactly this kind of cross-pollination. The 38 collaborators ranged in age from fourteen to over seventy-years- old. Our non-hierarchical community-curation model of exhibit development meant that all team members shaped the themes, ideas, and content of the exhibit, which we did through Google Docs, listening sessions, and peer review. In that process, the project embodied dialogue across age.
More broadly, however, we see intergenerational dialogue as a method by which young people in Baltimore today communicate with their “cultural ancestors,” or the writers who came before themFootnote 15 (Figure 2). For Victor Rodgers, former Artistic Director with DewMore Baltimore, Chicory “created and cultivated the opportunity for a very organic and profound cross generational conversation about how poetry serves as both a tool for community building and advocacy and as a proverbial megaphone to tell the stories of those who often go unnoticed and unheard—especially young people.”Footnote 16
Poetry facilitators A’niya Taylor (left of banner) and Jay Le Rey (right of banner) with members of the organization Youth of the Diaspora after touring the “Soul of the Butterfly: Chicory Magazine and Baltimore’s Black Arts Activism,” and participating in a Remix and Response writing workshop. Courtesy of Chicory Revitalization Project.
As Rodgers and the opening anecdote suggest, the resonances between the past and the present ring loudly. When we read, interpret, and respond to poems written in the same place decades apart, an essentially civic question arises: What has changed or not? What is the role of place-based art in social justice? A new Chicory, launched in 2024 by Rodgers, Devlon Waddell, and Kevin Johnson Jr., continues the dialogue while also adapting it to the present.Footnote 17 Like the original editors, the new editors offer community writing workshops and address special issues to topics of importance to Baltimore, like gun violence. However, they have expanded the definition of community. While the original Chicory excluded queer voices, the new magazine brings them in, redressing the homophobia in the Black Arts Movement and Black cultural nationalism. The dialogue between past and present is represented simply and profoundly in the way the new magazine’s issues are identified with two numbers. The premier issue of the relaunched magazine, published in September 2024, is numbered both Issue 1 and Legacy 149, as if the original magazine had never stopped being published.
In a moment when the public humanities are under attack in the United States, we need to experiment to meaningfully connect with communities. Our work with the CRP since 2018 suggests that vernacular poetry is one powerful method of doing so, especially with young people. While every poem embodies emotional history, with its accessible language, Chicory is particularly useful for public humanists because its texts resonate more easily than more traditional kinds of poetry or other historical documents. From those echoes, we create a dialogue across time and generation about place, race, and the role of art in social change.
Mary Rizzo is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark. She works at the intersection of inclusive public history, digital humanities, urban studies, and 20th century U.S. cultural history. In 2026, University of Iowa Press will publish Baltimore’s Black Arts Then & Now: Behind the Scenes of a Collaborative Public Humanities Project, written by her and several CRP collaborators. She is also the author of Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) and Class Acts: Young Men and the Rise of Lifestyle (University of Nevada Press, 2015).
Author contribution
Conceptualization: M.R.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Melvin E. Brown, Rejjia Camphor, Patrice Hutton, Patrick Oray, and Victor Rodgers, who have been my key collaborators on the Chicory Revitalization Project since the beginning.
Funding statement
The author received a seed grant and fellowship from the Whiting Foundation in support of the Chicory Revitalization Project.
Conflicts of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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