Award for Dedication and Commitment to Service, and many other honors.

Giovanni has won three NAACP Image Awards for Literature, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Langston Hughes award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Since then, in addition to numerous collections of poetry, Giovanni is the author of 12 children’s books, eight nonfiction books, ten spoken word albums, and was featured in a presidential campaign ad for Joe Biden in 2020. Giovanni published her first two books of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgement, in 1968. She attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. As part of the Black Arts Movement, Giovanni organized the first Black Arts Festival in Cincinnati, and edited the Black art journal Conversation. There, she reestablished the Fisk chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an important group in the civil rights movement. Giovanni earned her BA from Fisk University, a historically Black institution (HBCU). Giovanni grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, but she also lived with her grandparents in Knoxville when she was a teenager.

in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1973, and was nicknamed “Nikki” by her older sister. Nikki Giovanni was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. Like a train, the movement has many interlocking and interdependent parts requires many people to start, propel, and steer it transports many people along with it and has the ability to travel long distances. Giovanni’s poem is an extended metaphor that compares the civil rights movement to a train. Board of Education, the vicious racially motivated murder of fourteen-year-old Emmet Till, and Parks’s brave decision to take a stand against segregation while riding a Montgomery city bus. The poem is also inspired by progress and setbacks experienced during the civil rights movement, including Thurgood Marshall’s Supreme Court victory in Brown v.

The porters’ union was an important precursor to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s its formation becomes a refrain that organizes and propels the verse. “Rosa Parks,” named for famed the civil rights icon, takes readers through the creation of the first all-Black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), in 1925.

Nikki rosa