It also occurs to me that every year, for Black History Month every year we got a canned set of people we were supposed to learn about, of whom Brooks might have been one?

Oh, yeah, I don't think that was a thing at my school.

Also, I don't remember studying poetry in high school except for the one year of AP English, and then I'm not sure we covered anyone more recent than the WWI poets. It was Tudor England through WWI.

I also, come to think of it, remember one poem for Academic Decathlon, and it was a modern black poet, so there may have been others, but obviously not ones that stuck in my memory.