By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s – and beyond – was a political movement which often used art to help change popular opinion. Poets associated with civil rights often used their poetry to commemorate those figureheads who campaigned, fought, and sometimes died to bring about social change; they also used their writing to alert white readers to the realities of life in the United States as an African American.