1. The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor
Historical Context

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s
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 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.
The March on Washington occurred.
President Kennedy was assassinated.

5. Later in the 1960s, 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 1960s she first began to understand that being black was a negative thing.

6. The Jehovah’s Witnesses
Naylor became a Jehovah’s Witness when she turned 18.
After the 1960s, 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.