Adventurous alibris.com shoppers should find a link to the title We Speak as Liberators: Young Black Poets—An Anthology, by Orde Coombs. In this rare and valuable book of 1970 is the work of Shirley Staples, “A nineteen-year-old junior majoring in English at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama.” Her poem “Getting It Together” is wakeup call to self—one embracing the Black consciousness of the time. This is a wonderful snapshot of the political world of a young woman in 1970—a youth of the Vietnam era, a maturing adolescence that may provide some reflection and focus for the teens of the Iraq era.
Written by . . . . . . . Shirley Staples
Archival Research by . . . . . . . Tasha Dionne Thomas
XHTML/CSS Programming by . . . . . . . Bryan Wilhite