The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor

The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor Historical Context http: //www. enotes. com/women-brewster

The Northern States After World War II • Story starts right after WW I, but extends for about 30 years • After WW II, many immigrants as well as Southern blacks went to NY looking for jobs. • Naylor’s parents moved there in 1949, having come from poor, sharecropping Southern families.

• They had grown up as children in the still-segregated South and wanted better opportunities for their children. • They found a more subtle form of segregation in the North too, however. • Nevertheless, their children could attend school and use libraries, which they had not been able to do as black children in the South.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960 s • The Naylors moved into their home in Queens, NY, in 1963…a turbulent year at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. • Medgar Evers was assassinated. • The 16 th Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama. • The March on Washington occurred. • President Kennedy was assassinated.

• Later in the 1960 s, Martin Luther King was assassinated, marking the culmination of 10 years of violence against blacks. • Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. • The Black Power Movement gained momentum. • Gloria Naylor says that in the 1960 s she first began to understand that being black was a negative thing.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses • Naylor became a Jehovah’s Witness when she turned 18. • After the 1960 s, she believed that there was no longer hope for the world. • Many Jehovah’s Witnesses are blacks and women, perhaps because their religion allows their voices to emerge and spread a life-giving message.

• Naylor’s writing reflects her experiences with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. • …Brewster Place depicts a close-knit community of women bound together in a sisterhood as a defense against a corrupt world.

• The Jehovah’s Witnesses predict the destruction of the evil world. • Naylor depicts two apocalyptic events in … Brewster Place: A violent rape and the torrential rains that follow it. • Naylor has said that The Women of Brewster Place served to “exorcise demons, ” evoking the evil that portends the end of the world.