I should like to thank Mr. Cudle and you for the opportunity. I appreciate it very much indeed, especially as I am to have the pleasure and privilege of talking about one whom I am very much interested in and in whom, I trust, you too will find something of interest and significance. There is at least this much of interest and significance in Dunbar that it is now nearly a year ago since he died and no one has yet taken his place as a representative Negro poet. And I only hope I am not bringing coals to Newcastle if I come bringing you some estimate of what Dunbar was as a representative Negro poet—and what, in my opinion he should be to a literary society such as I am told yours is.
I am not going to weary you with details about Dunbar’s life—he was as most of you know born of slave parents and poverty—and for these regions a true child of his people. And there came to him the birthright of a race tradition, just as there comes to every one of us a birthright, and my point is, ladies and gentlemen, that he did not sell it when he sold his time and labor running an elevator in Dayton, Ohio—when he was discovered as a literary man by the Dean of American Literature, William D. Howells. He did not in his justifiable pride forget this birthright, but accepted it as both an opportunity and at the same time a limitation. Dunbar might like many another peasant genius written of times, and classes and traditions which were not his by birth and inheritance. His was the tradition of the Negro, of slavery, of poverty, of an hopeful and improved optimism and it is to his lasting credit that he never forgot them, that he was eager to express them in literature as a tribute to his people. I say it is a great thing, an unfailing sign of a sterling personality neither to forget nor despise its origin. Whatever else Dunbar may have sold I care not—at least he did not sell the birthright of greater price, his race tradition. This then is all I desire to call to your attention, that Dunbar devoted his life to expressing his race tradition in literature. Dr. Du Bois says, “A man works with his hands not with his complexion, with his brains not with his facial angle.” Dunbar need not have written of Negro life and emotion, nor even if he wrote of them did he need to write of them as one of them and my point is that he did.
First then let me remind you of a few things he accomplished, and then after that of the great unaccomplished and what that means for you and for me in the light of Dunbar’s example.
There have been greater writers than Dunbar of Negro extraction. Dumas in France, Robert Browning in England are said to have had a Negro strain in their ancestry—one of the great Russian poets of the last century was also of Negro descent—I refer to the celebrated Pushkin, and in France there has recently died Jose Mairee de Heredia a Negro poet of more than temporary worth and an accepted leader in contemporary French literature. But these men have not been American and so have not been representative of the Afro-American, nor have they written as exponents of race-tradition. Dunbar, I would have you understand, I believe to be a minor poet, but a minor poet of very great significance because he was the first man of free Negro descent who obtained literary recognition as an exponent of the American Negro life in poetry. And I should like to talk over with you briefly what he has done in this. First there are the poems of Negro dialect—glimpses of true Negro life and emotion pathetically portrayed. It’s generally the life of the southern Negro, the lyrical Negro—and by that I mean the man who remembers and is not ashamed to remember the days of slavery. Before Dunbar the southern Negro had been exploited by many other writers, particularly in the southern novels and stories of men like Joel Chandler Harris [and] Thomas Nelson Page and against the dark background of Aunt and Uncle Remus, the highlights of their novels are brought out in excellent and effective contrast—but in all that has been written about the Negro since Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and even in that to a certain extent, the true Negro has been conspicuous by his absence.
Now why do I lay such emphasis on the fact and insist as if it needed no proof that the Negro must reveal himself if the true instincts and characteristics of the race are ever to find place in literature? In Ireland now some of the greatest literary men of our time are hard at work, visiting the humble cabins of the Irish peasants collecting their folk tales, their stories and writing them into literature. They realize nowadays that all literature, especially lyric and ballad poetry is a nation or race product. And in the primitive emotions and traditions of humble people men are today finding new material and new inspiration for literature. And the more a people has suffered the more they have been isolated and left to themselves out of the blurring contact of an education that substitutes a written for a spoken tradition, the closer that people has been left to richer soil and the outdoor life which agriculture demands, the more does this folk tradition develop.
Dunbar has gone direct to this which I would have you consider the priceless warehouse of our race, as the one great compensation of the days of oppression and slavery. You were then uneducated, you couldn’t express what you felt so you sang—and the slave hymns, your songs of sorrow as “I’m a goin’ through an unfriendly world,” your songs of hope, your Swing Low Sweet Chariot and the rest are in the sense that only is ours which we make or buy with our own exertions. And when Dunbar writes a stanza like this: “Its mighty troublesome lying round/this sorrow laden empty ground/and often I thinks/it would be a sweet thing to do/and go long home” or “de trees is bending in the storm/the rain done hid the mountains/I’s am in distress/but listen dats a voice I been/a say in to me, loud and clear/Babylon in de wilderness.” I say when Dunbar writes such poetry as that he is expressing you and you should recognize your race tradition in it, and first be humbled, and then thankful, and then be proud.
I do not want to keep you overlong but I must show what Dunbar has done for you. As a race we all have our share in a debt of grateful memory—that to Lincoln—most of us cannot express our gratitude we are tongue tied with the fullness of the heart. And if any of you feel as I do, you will appreciate what I mean when I say Dunbar paid your debt for you. Or again a teacher of mine once told me no race can succeed without its heroes, its martyrs, and whoever lifts up a true man of your race to your admiration and imitation has done you a just service. I am not going to tell those of you who do not know to whom this next section refers, but I say that there is cause for congratulation if any man of our race can be spoken of with truth as Dunbar speaks of this man—and still more if our petty jealousies do not blind us to the real truth of men.
And then do I need to tell you that throughout all his poetry, Dunbar is an exponent of race tradition—in the poems not written in the Negro dialect quite as much as in those written in dialect? It is because with the Negro farm hand he could say, “Standin’ at de winder/feelin’ kind of glum/listening to de rain drops/play de little drum/field and road and medder/swimming like a sea/Lord a mercy on us/whats de good of me.”
I say it is because the Negro farmer could say that and Dunbar entered into his emotion that he would write such true poetry as what I am about to read, poetry that can take its stand with the best of English lyrics, poetry not doggerel, clear worded not tongue tied with dialect, but nevertheless expressive of Negro sentiment.
Heart of my heart the day is chill
The mist hangs low over the wooded hill
The soft white mist and the heavy cloud
The sun and the face of the heaven’s shroud
The birds are thick in the dripping trees
That drop their pearls to the beggar breeze
No songs are rife when songs are wont
Each singer crouches in his haunt
Now when Dunbar takes the crude thoughts of a Negro farm hand, and refines and expresses them so that they may in certain instances take their place in English literature, and take that place not only as a contribution but as a representation of the Negro, he has been of some service to you and me. Why, You ask? You speak the English language, you have and are receiving through that medium the benefits of civilization—moreover you speak that English language after your own fashion, for your own needs—you owe it a debt. And I am sure that I can appeal to whomever of you may be so practical minded as to think poetry of little worth and value, when I say that the only way to repay that debt is to repay it in kind—you can’t pay for civilization except by becoming civilized, you can’t pay for the English language and its benefits except by contributing to it in a permanent endowment of literature. Dunbar is our first contribution, and however small in intrinsic worth he may be, however far down in the scale of literary values he may stand (and you must remember that that scale is set by such standards as Shakespeare and Milton) he is significant—very significant to me—for surely it is more blessed to give than to receive.
One more point and I will have finished. I said in the beginning that Dunbar didn’t sell his birthright—the tradition of his race. Now at the risk of seeming impertinent I shall make one practical application of the practical significance of Dunbar to each of every one of us. I hope I shall not seem to be moralizing, it is not seemly for a young man to preach sermons, but I do want to impress upon myself as well as you this fact: If we are a race we must have a race tradition, and if we are to have a race tradition, we must keep and cherish it as a priceless—yes as a holy thing—and above all not be ashamed to wear the badge of our tribe. And I do not refer so much to outward manifestations or aggressiveness. I do not think we are Negroes because we are of varying degrees of black, brown, yellow, nor do I think it is because we do or should all act alike. We are a race because we have a common race tradition, and each man of us becomes such just in proportion as he recognizes, knows and reverences that tradition. And I would above all have this opinion of Dunbar in your minds—that he was one among dozens of cultivated Negroes who devoted himself to perpetuating the tradition of the American Negro. He was interested in all of it—from the Negro’s love for dancing and music … And even in so small a detail as the plantation Negro’s love for molasses and water. He was interested in preserving the old traditions. The old styles, those that are gradually vanishing and that the younger generation seem so anxious to forget. This is the most discouraging feature of our problem to me—the younger generation want to forget, they want to forget the slavery, the plain simple useful religion, the staunch probity—yes they would forget them quite as quickly as they would forget the petty faults, the love of watermelon and chicken, the banjo and the barn dances. They seem as anxious to forget the great virtues, the instructive traits drilled into the race as all such must be drilled into any race, by suffering and experience. And the vital question is: In forgetting this tradition are they not forgetting the lessons their fathers and grandfathers learned before them? Is the dance hall in the city as innocent an amusement as the plantation dance in the corncrib? Is the grandfather who has been a slave a family disgrace or a family pride? Is the cheerful hopeful optimism of the forefathers a thing unknown and undesired by their children? I shall not answer these questions because from my limited experience I cannot answer them favorably. But I can say this: If we do not sell our birthright we will keep this tradition. If we keep this tradition we will reverence Dunbar as one of the few who have taught us to reverence and cherish it. If we reverence Dunbar we shall not claim he is a great poet, but we shall say that we need more like him—his place needs to be filled, for his task is very unfinished. I hope we have not come this far in the wanderings of thought without having reached a definite, yes a practical conclusion. Here is my argument in a nutshell—a race to advance must accept the experience of one generation as a starting point for the next—race-tradition is the means of handing down that experience—literature, race literature is necessary to preserve that tradition, especially when by means of social conditions the unwritten tradition is weakening. Dunbar, finally as a pioneer in the expression in preservation of race tradition in literature is for us a very significant and important person. I said in the beginning Dunbar did not sell his birthright; here is his practical lesson to each and every one of us. Some of us have more birthright than others, some of us have lost more than others, at any rate do not let us discard that one which we all possess in common, which is, to my thinking, the most important in all, our race tradition.
This is what I call race pride. It is a very humble pride and therefore justifiable. Moreover these few remarks that I bring to you are my interpretation of what I mean when I say we should be proud of Dunbar yet humbly proud withal, for he was no great genius, nor is his task at all complete, but he was of us and was proud to be of us.
(Delivered February 20, 1905 Cambridge Lyceum)