Negro Poets and Their Poems

by Robert Thomas Kerlin

Mae Smith Johnson

Altogether admirable is the disposition of Negro verse-writers to eulogize the notable personages of their race, the men and women who have blazed the trail of advance. The mention of Attucks, Black Sampson, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and others like these, all practically unknown to white readers, is frequent, and reverential odes and sonnets to Douglass, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Washington, Dunbar, are many and enthusiastic. Here as elsewhere, however, I refrain from giving mere titles and from comments on productions merely cited. The reader will find such poems as I allude to in every poet’s volume. I refer to this body of eulogistic verse only to suggest to the reader who takes up the writings of the American Negroes that he will learn that they have a heritage of heroic traditions from which poetry springs in every race.

Instead of giving here such specimens of poetic eulogy as I have alluded to, however, I shall give a few poems of a more general significance, poems of appeal or tribute to the entire black race or poems of affectionate tribute to individuals. A free-verse poem entitled “The Negro,” by Mr. Langston Hughes, on page 200, may be recalled. Here is a sonnet with the same title, by Mr. McKay, which appeared in The People’s Pilot, published in Richmond, Va.:

THE NEGRO

Think ye I am not fiend and savage too?
Think ye I could not arm me with a gun
And shoot down ten of you for every one
Of my black brothers murdered, burnt by you?
Be not deceived, for every deed ye do
I could match—outmatch: am I not Afric’s son,
Black of that black land where black deeds are done?
But the Almighty from the darkness drew
My soul and said: Even thou shalt be a light
Awhile to burn on the benighted earth;
Thy dusky face I set among the white
For thee to prove thyself of highest worth;
Before the world is swallowed up in night,
To show thy little lamp; go forth, go forth!

From another Virginia magazine, also now defunct, The Praiseworthy Muse, of Norfolk, I take the following poem, signed by John J. Fenner, Jr.:

RISE! YOUNG NEGRO—RISE!

Ho! we from slumber wake!
Rise! young Negro—rise!
Begin our daily task anew—
Thank God we’re spared to—
Rise! young Negro—rise!

Thy task may be an humble one.
Rise! young Negro—rise!
However great, however small,
Honesty and respect for all—
Rise! young Negro—rise!