Equality and Justice for All
(Photograph of a panel of the Carl Schurz Monument)
As elsewhere intimated there is being produced in America a literature of which America, as the term is commonly understood, is not aware. It is a literature of protest—protest sometimes pathetic and prayerful, sometimes vehement and bitter. It comes from Negro writers, in prose and verse, in the various forms of fiction, drama, essay, editorial, and lyric. It is only with the lyric form that we are here concerned. Of that we shall make a special presentation, in this chapter.
An artistic and restrained expression of the protest against irrational color prejudice, in the plaintive, pathetic key, is found in the following free-verse poem by Winston Allen:
THE BLACK VIOLINIST
I touched the violin,
I, whose hand was black,
I touched the violin
In a grand salon.
I touched the violin
In a Russian palace.
I touched the violin
And the dream-born strains
Chanted by the Congo
Soared to Heaven’s chambers.
Could I touch the violin?
I, whose hand was black?
And bring to life dream music?
Men had taunted me,
Age-worn months: their jeers
Snapped to bits my heartstrings,
Snapped my inner soul;
And the sting of living
Tortured me the livelong day.
Sometimes the protest runs in a lighter vein—as thus, in verses entitled:
OLD JIM CROW
Wherever we live, it’s right to forgive,
It’s wrong to hold malice, we know,
But there’s one thing that’s true, from all points of view,
All Negroes hate old man Jim Crow.