The Cycle
These poems distilled from my experience,
Exactly tell my feelings of today,
The cruel and the vicious and the tense
Conditions which have hedged my bitter way
Of life. But though I suffered much I bore
My cross and lived to put my trouble in song
I stripped down harshly to the naked core
Of hatred based on the essential wrong!
But tomorrow, I may sing another tune,
No critic, white or black, can tie me down,
Maybe a fantasy of a fairy moon,
Or the thorns the soldiers weaved for Jesus’ crown,
For I, a poet, can soar with unclipped wings,
From earth to heaven, while chanting of all things.
circa 1943
1
Now, really I have never cared a damn
For being on the wrong side of the fence,
Even though I was as naked as a lamb,
And thought by many to be just as dense.
But being black and poor, I always feel
That all I have and hold is my own mind,
In which I am quite rich in woe and weal
And need not barter for mess of any kind.
For what have I, oh brothers of mine to lose?
Except a piece or so of my black skin,
That I against the elements may bruise
From incompetent manouvre or from sin!
But whatever it may be, this is a fact,
I care not if my mind remains intact.
circa 1943
2
The millionaire from Boston likes to write,
His letters scintillate the daily news.
He wrote a leftish paper to indict
My thoughts of Negroes and oppose my views.
He has a Negro friend and thinks therefore,
Himself authority on the Negro race,
And whites and blacks who disagree are poor
Damned fools who know their sole not from their face.
Our millionaire was once a Socialist,
But thought his party wrong on World War Two,
So liberal turned like many who enlist
In this grand fight for good old life or new.
I will not hint it was safer for his money,
For that would neither be polite or funny.
circa 1943
3
Where the Bostonian lives, I’m not aware,
Perhaps Waldorf or Astor shelters him,
In New York or some good place of lesser fare,
But Harlem’s out of bounds, dismal and grim.
And he is one of those who like to parrot
The popular song of Negro segregation,
His features lengthen and redden like a carrot,
When he pours all into his agitation
Of Negro separation from the white.
It is this thing that offers us no hope,
That understanding whites with blacks unite
To make the slogan of the Negro group.
In these times when means are sufficient to ends,
My prayer to God is: Save us from our friends!
circa 1943
4
In Southern states distinctions that they draw
Are clear like starshine in the firmament,
But in the North we’re equal under the law,
Which white men make their plans and circumvent.
What law can hold whites in a Northern street,
When blacks move in? They flee as from the devil,
As if God quickly energised their feet,
To take them far from the impending evil.
Meanwhile the ghoulish landlords rents inflate,
To save them from the inevitable slump,
For banks down Negro homes to lowest rate,
And soon the street becomes a Negro dump.
Oh Segregation! Negro leaders bawl,
And white liberals join them at the wailing wall.
circa 1943
5
I wonder who these wealthy whites are fooling,
Themselves, the poor whites or the poor black folk?
To imagine that their smooth, infantile drooling,
Will make the poor whites shoulder black men’s yoke.
Why should poor whites aspiring to those things
Their rich possess by black men be encumbered,
Pay heed to hypocrites who are pulling strings,
Merely among the “leaders” to be numbered?
Were I a poor white I would never surrender
My privilege to advance as other whites,
But let the powerful group be the defender,
Of decency and progress—people’s rights.
Their wealth and privilege and education,
Should teach them how to serve the entire nation.
circa 1943
6
Our boys and girls are taught in Negro schools,
That they are just like other Americans,
And grow up educated semi-fools,
And ripe for spurious words of charlatans.
The group from which they spring they all despise,
For they imagine that if not for it,
They’d have a better chance in the world to rise,
Instead of being branded as unfit!
Thus they are ready for any crazy scheme,
That carries with it an offer of escape,
Although elusive as a bright sunbeam,
Or empty as the cranium of an ape.
But thus we’re educated, friends and brothers,
To the American way of life—just like the others.
circa 1943
7
Tuskegee is disliked by Negro snobs,
Because it is an exclusive Negro college.
And in their eyes this situation robs
The place of quality in dispensing knowledge.
But there are Negro schools where white folks teach,
Who by the outraged South are ostracized,
And are considered by the snobs to reach
Those heights of scholarship that should be prized.
And there are others where some whites attend,
With colored students and the snobs declare:
That is the perfect system to defend,
As a symbol that EQUALITY is here!
Oh for a Mencken upright on his feet,
To blast the smugness of the black elite.
circa 1943
8
I feel quite proud of my black African face,
As a leopard his spots or a zebra of his stripes,
For one big thrill about the human race,
Is its wonderful diversity of types.
But I am not proud that I do belong
To a minority group that is afraid
That criticism of itself is wrong—
And all its ills at other doors should be laid.
But the majority know the thing they want,
Prefer, perhaps, the minority that way,
So that it may remain the slave of cant,
Finding life sour while they are making hay.
The great White Lord after work and play and dining,
Must need his clown to entertain with whining.
circa 1943
There is a new thing, pretty and dime-bright,
Which subtly they are peddling through the states:
That Negro people have turned anti-white,
With trembling whites afraid within their gates!
The Cracker grabbed the Negro by the neck,
And New York’s Irish fought him tooth and nail,
But neither ever cried to him, By heck!
You must love us white people without fail.
This new thing started out in New York City,
With one main object: To humbug the nation,
And rob the Negro of all human pity
And multiply his harsh humiliation:
To make blacks anti-white and anti-Semitic,
Is just a damnable oriental trick!
circa 1943
10
Now I should like to ask for illustration,
Why should blacks be overwhelmed with love of whites?
Does the Jew waste love on the German nation
For dooming him to medieval nights?
There are German thousands who are not anti-Jew,
More than friends of blacks in the U.S.A. perhaps,
But all are blamed for what the Nazis do,
And must take the righteous world’s unfriendly raps.
Now I do love the United States, so grand
In bigness, frankness and brutality,
Love it because this great amazing land,
Is so free from the Old World’s hypocrisy:
But this new Negro anti-whitism rumor—
Why, has America no sense of humor?
circa 1943
They say in Harlem that I’m pretty washed up,
Like an old car that missed its way and leaped
Over a high wall and was grandly smashed up
Where wrecks of many more were sadly heaped.
They say it happened because I had the nerve
To oppose the Communists and boldly say
Their play for Negroes did not tend to serve
The Negroes’ interests, but just the other way.
They say the Reds have power in every place,
Even to stop men from getting decent work,
But before I would to them myself abase
I’d rather clean the sewers of New York,
And be washed up against a long cold bar,
Rather than be a Harlem commissar.
circa 1943
12
The Communists know how Negro life’s restricted,
To very special grooves in this vast land,
And so pursue and persecute the afflicted
Hiding betimes their bloody Levantine hand.
From futile propaganda they have turned
To welfare work and local politics,
Where plums are big and sweet and can be earned
By playing hard the game with devilish tricks.
For the Negro people, for so long plaything
Of elephant and ass the C.P. has a role,
They seek to tie their leaders with a string,
And thus over the Negroes get control.
And they use means foreign to our Western way,
That should make the elephant roar and the donkey bray.
circa 1943
Thus I’m boycotted by the Communists,
And censored by their literary dean,
I’m never in their lugubrious lists
Of Negro writers of the American scene.
So in their way they do attempt their best
To emulate the Soviet paradise,
Where works of Trotsky and others are suppressed
So the Russian soul should be more Stalin-wise.
And they have found interesting satellites,
Among the Negro college men who lack
The courage to oppose any group of whites,
Who seek to woo blacks just because they’re black.
So there you are and there we are, my friend,
How can a Negro choose what to defend?
circa 1943
14
The New York critics say, when Shakespeare wrote
Othello, that he did not mean to make
A hero out of a Negro, that the Poet
Meant Arab, which the white mind could easier take.
Now everywhere in Europe, the word Moor
Means African black as it did in Shakespeare’s day,
When black folk were not “Untouchables,” before
The Anglo-Saxons over the world held sway.
The greatest sultan of Morocco was black,
His tomb is there at Rabat to attest it,
And Lalla Chella’s, his spouse, who turned her back
On Europe to share his powerful throne—and blest it!
He lived in the Fourteenth Century, his reign
Extending through all North Africa and Spain.
circa 1943
They have a colored actor in this land,
As good as any since theatre had its start.
But stage nor screen can use him in the grand
Old manner for simply he is very swart.
A hero needs a heroine at his side,
But as white folk object to Negro love
From life or stage, our actor is denied
That vehicle by which he himself can prove.
Oh, all the critics shower him with praise,
But mention not that Aryan taboo
From which he cannot shake himself or raise
His job as a tragedian to pursue.
The great actor stands lonely in his height
Bereft of a black heroine or a white!
circa 1943
16
Hollywood is our first and greatest source
Of education, greater than our schools,
Hollywood’s talents chart the national course
Of study for our wise folks and our fools.
They sway the towns and far-off country places
By the lure of the tinsel-plated American type,
White glamor girl and boy have set the paces,
And the Negro is lucky their capering feet to wipe.
Now, ask the Negro not to love Hollywood,
We Negroes love this land for other things,
Its strength and bigness and cities where our blood
Congeals on pavements whence the terror springs.
We love this land—with hope our eyes are filled,
But we thrill not to it as the whites are thrilled.
circa 1943
If I were white I’d be in Hollywood,
A long time since like thousands other whites.
And then I would be in all likelihood
Less critical of the Hollywood delights.
But color-barred my wits come sharp together
To perceive Hollywood stamp on the Negro’s face
With Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather,
Insulting all fine instincts of my race.
Oh, for themselves no Cabins in the Sky
But Heaven Can Wait, while life’s enjoyed on earth,
And they supreme on a colossal lie,
With blacks supplying artificial mirth.
Not being white or actor I can say,
I hate what Hollywood means in every way.
circa 1943
18
When I go out into the crowded street
And a white person smiles, I return the smile,
Stop not to ask the motive for my feet
Are busy like thousands in the usual style.
I want not to find out what whites say “nigger”:
I have never been curious to know,
Nor do I want to waste my time to figure
How many are anti-black, how many pro!
I do not wear a chip upon my shoulder,
As I go elbowing among the crowd,
I do not feel I am the perfect holder
Of my race’s honor, arrogantly proud.
I’m only a human being, if you will let me,
Taking a sidewalk jaunt with naught to fret me.
circa 1943
Whichever way the whites may writhe and squirm
The fact remains that Negroes are suppressed,
Kept underfoot as far down as a worm—
Jews under Nazis are not more unblest.
If Hitler ever gets Jews to their knees
As abjectly as Negroes in these states,
Then baiting of the Jews at once will cease,
For they’ll be of all bereft without the gates!
So expect me not a hypocrite to say
Some other people is worse off than mine,
For facts remain in war and peace to flay
The falsehoods from the propaganda line.
If I tell the truth, it may not be in vain,
To another suffering group it may bring gain.
circa 1943
20
And thus, I may be reaching those who mourn,
Who suffer from the claws of the wild beasts,
Whose loved ones from them have been harshly torn
To dance like Simians at a macabre feast.
And thus may be established a true bond
Of understanding sympathy with others,
Perhaps a place set upon kindred ground,
Where men of different tribes may work like brothers.
But how can we unite with those who praise
Unstintingly the forces which oppress,
Who find the perfect democratic ways
In institutions which deny blacks access.
For such job they may find some Negro craven,
Who sees life “white” though blacker than raven.
circa 1943
Oh filthily they run the tenements
In which we live and they short-weight our food,
All second-rate as they overcharge our rents—
For black folk any rotten stuff is good!
They sell our youngsters the exciting zoots,
Which conflicts stir between them and the whites,
From our sad lives they pluck the finest fruits
To entertain their jaded appetites!
And then they reach out to control our brains,
Cocksure from N.Y.U. and City College
Their children rush to Harlem on the trains,
With their ideas of dispensing knowledge,
Of Marx to Negroes who for centuries,
Have had their glory cabins in the skies!
circa 1943
22
Black intellectuals deep dive for the bait.
It is easy our misfortune to transfer
To blind Class Struggle, even at Heaven’s gate
We shout to God his blessings to confer!
And so in summer, while they are making hay
Upon our woes, in winter burning coal,
We turn from Heaven to Hades, there to pray
Karl Marx to take in charge our helpless soul!
So, while their grip is on the Negro’s throat,
His real problem they dexterously evade,
For they are sitting safely in the boat,
Which they employ the Negro sea to raid:
Betimes their sirens chant of heavenly roses
In Marx’s Canaan in exchange for Moses!
circa 1943
Lord, let me not be silent while we fight
In Europe Germans, Asia Japanese
For setting up a Fascist way of might
While fifteen million Negroes on their knees
Pray for salvation from the Fascist yoke
Of these United States. Remove the beam
(Nearly two thousand years since Jesus spoke)
From your own eye before the mote you deem
It proper from your neighbor’s to extract!
We bathe our lies in vapors of sweet myrrh,
And close our eyes not to perceive the fact!
But Jesus said: You whited sepulchre,
Pretending to be uncorrupt of sin,
While worm-infested, rotten stinking within!
1945
24
Oh, science keeps marching on from Time to Time,
And even Religion with life keeps up its stride,
But like a universal nursery rhyme,
Our thinkers chant Class Struggle far and wide.
Great new inventions quickly are accepted,
Prophets and saints dissected by degree,
But nowhere in our system is projected
A programme to end human misery.
Karl Marx: He died some sixty years ago,
And left mankind his mystical class war
To save the world from universal woe,
Yet man’s experience from near and far,
Proves that the types we designate as masses
Have always fought the battle of the classes.
circa 1943
Men always fight by nations, tribes or groups,
The Russian Revolution was put through
By middleclass men who got hold of the troops
And inculcated in them what to do.
If we must have a change of rule, I guess
I’d rather the old bandits that I know
To the new gangsters who eloquently profess
All things to all men which they can’t bestow.
I’d just be ruled by old men full of vice
Than proletarians spitting in my face,
And scratching in their armpits full of lice.
I’ll say what was well said in time and space:
“For forms of Government let fools contest
Whate’er is best administered is best.”
circa 1943
26
Of all the sects I hate the Communists,
Who harvest the misery of mankind to build
A new religion, because the ancient mists
Obscure our vision and our eyes are filled!
And the Emancipator Science is seized
By the rich and utilized against the poor,
And even God in his Heaven is displeased
As Science thus bypasses the poor man’s door.
The Communists, blind leaders of the blind,
Manipulating God and politics,
Brazenly hold forth to deceive mankind
With potpourri of clever Marxian tricks:
And the abdicated intellectuals
Among them are the greatest criminals!
circa 1943
These intellectuals do not want to face
Our problems here: Europe is Fascist but—
Why fifteen million Negroes in their place
Know that it’s Fascism keeps them in the rut!
The Fascist white South rules this land again,
Its sons are dominant in the armed forces,
(Its daughters marry powerful Northern men)
And incontestably shape the Negroes’ courses.
The South completely rules in Washington,
In industry takes all the better jobs,
The nation tells what with “niggers” should be done,
And sets the paces for our Northern snobs!
Oh go to Russia my lily-white writer friend
And leave the South our liberties to defend!
circa 1943
28
The Russian advocates drive high-powered cars
To great skyscraper offices where they write
In praise of Mother Russia to the stars,
For those who like their Russia in scintillant white.
These Russian advocates are very wilful,
They want us all to go to Russia to school,
And yet in many ways they’re not so skillful,
Their tactics could not even deceive a fool!
One thing I know, if It should happen here,
These agitators would be the first to side,
With the power-filled groups—the Fascists I declare—
Nor hesitate in their great cars to ride,
With their philosophy of new line and shoddy,
Over the Negro’s bruised and broken body!
circa 1943
Of course, we have Democracy but it
Is plain Fascist Democracy for whites,
Where fifteen million blacks are not thought fit,
To partake of Democracy’s delights.
The fact is we are not considered human,
By our rulers who control from birth to tomb,
Are not considered children born of woman
As whites who issue from their mother’s womb!
Since Color is the most expressive brand
Of American Fascism and forms its basis,
Europe, of course, we cannot understand,
Where Fascism thrives on differences of races.
So Europe we must conquer, educate
The World by mark of color to separate.
circa 1943
30
Big, little white man had his mind made up,
To deny me food and shelter, thus to rob
Me of the means of living, mix my cup
Of gall with poison—take away my job!
Like me big little white man wrote books alright,
Then turned to other fields, which he could choose,
Not difficult for one talented and white,
And always careful cautious words to use!
And we blacks treat such whites as superior men,
And try to emulate them at their tricks!
We shout Democracy around their den
Of iniquity of jobs and politics.
But I, though I may walk the street unkempt
Do hold such white men in supreme contempt!
circa 1943
I’m utterly entranced by Westbrook Pegler,
And read his pieces with unfailing relish,
For more than any one he is the reg’lar
American guy who is so suavely hellish
In fixing up his victims with a prick,
Even as insects do the entomologist
So dexterously in his glass case stick
For those who have a scientific twist.
I envy this man, the great interpreter
Of the American mediocre mind,
Whose writings reach a million homes and stir
The people’s thinking like a mighty wind:
And yet I know myself and people like
He’d not hesitate to impale upon a spike.
circa 1943
32
Oh, how exasperating are the antics
Of Negroes reaching to the white man’s steeple,
And uttering the unchanging pedantics:
Oh let my people go, my imprisoned people!
For certainly our Negro leaders know,
Their people are not held behind prison bars,
They have the right in summer heat or snow
To stand on the earth and gaze up at the stars!
Some day the people may understand and rise,
To shout like cannon in their leaders’ face,
That all their words are shibboleths and lies,
To hold them safely anchored in their place.
And then the leaders feeling heavy as lead,
From out the white man’s steeple may fall dead.
circa 1943
The Negro critic has his special way:
By white appraisal rating Negroes’ works,
He thus succeeds some meaning to convey,
While his responsibility he shirks.
And to a mutual friend he has insisted,
While playing around with his beloved dice,
Just why my latest book was never listed
Among Negro books which were considered nice.
The critic said, Because I was not noted,
(It seemed so strange) by the New York Tribune,
Which by the cranky Greeley was promoted
For every cause, even that man’s in the moon:
He could not comprehend the white, who said
That Horace Greeley was a long time dead!
circa 1943
34
America said: Now, we’ve left Europe’s soil
With its deep national jealousies and hates,
Its religious prejudices and turmoil,
To build a better home within our gates.
English and German, French, Italian,
And Jew and Catholic and Protestant,
Yes, every European, every man
Is equal in this new abode, God grant.
And Africans were here as chattel slaves,
But never considered human flesh and blood,
Until their presence stirred the whites in waves
To sweep beyond them, onward like a flood,
To seek a greater freedom for their kind,
Leaving the blacks still half-slaves, dumb and blind.
circa 1943
This is the New World that we left the old
To build, here in America, they say.
From kings and lords and gentlemen bad and bold,
We turned to follow life the Indian way.
From oppressive priests and creeds to find release,
And feel the air around us really free,
To found a place where man may live in peace,
And grow and flower and bear fruit like a tree.
But from the beginning the Old World’s hand
Was heavy on the movement of the new,
Though wars and revolutions shook the land,
The grip remained and even tighter grew,
Until the New World opened up its gates
As an outpost of the Old World’s feuds and hates.
circa 1943
36
The white man is a tiger at my throat
Drinking my blood as my life ebbs away,
While saying that his terribly striped coat
Is Democracy’s and means the Light of Day.
Oh white man, you may suck all of my blood
And throw my carcass into potter’s field,
But never will I say with you your mud
Is bread for Negroes! Never will I yield.
Europe and Asia, Africa await
A new Fascism, the American brand,
And new worlds will be built upon race and hate
And the Eagle and the Dollar will command.
Oh Lord, my body and my heart too break,
The tiger in his strength his thirst must slake!
1946
It is the Negro’s tragedy I feel,
Binding me like a heavy iron chain,
It is the Negro’s wounds I want to heal,
Because I know the keenness of the pain.
For I am one—a Negro and no white
Can penetrate into the Negro’s ken
To feel the thickness of the shroud of night,
Which envelops and cuts him off from other men.
So what I write is shot out of my blood.
There is no white man who can write my book,
Though many imagine they were ordained by God
To tell what colored people think and brook.
They’ve done it for the Indian—thrust aside
From the wide field where white men whoop and ride.
1945
38
Were I a poor white I would surely throw
All of my spirit and all my life’s endeavor
Into the workers’ movement and would sing:
The Labor Front, The Labor Front forever.
But being black and unbeliever in
Mere signs and symbols I must frankly say
White labor organized oppresses blacks,
Pushes them around in every cruel way.
A Negro may seem ignorant, but knows
That nothing new for him is racism,
For sixty years he has lived in the South,
Under regimes in Europe known as Fascism.
And also in the North the thing exists,
Especially among the working-class
Where many unions are for “lily” whites,
And no Negroes possess the right to pass.
Oh there are unions which black men admit,
Like zombies herded in a ghastly hole,
Where white men move them like automatons
Sitting high above them in supreme control.
Say not in Labor’s stronghold of New York,
And whisper not in Fascist Washington,
White Labor’s is a Fascist union pointed,
Straight at the Negro’s cranium like a gun.
circa 1943
39
In Black Harlem they held a little meeting
Against the forces of advancing Fascism,
In which they said that even Negro people
Were being stirred by thoughts of Nazism!
And a white woman rose and boldly said:
You Negroes have been held down for so long,
You should forget yourselves, fight with the Jews
Who are both rich and powerful and strong.
This is wartime: no time to air your troubles
You must accept the status-quo, being weak,
You are our best of Christians and so must
When slapped on one cheek, turn the other cheek.
The Negroes hand-clapped, something must be done
When someone speaks and Negroes are polite,
And then, in this particular case, of course,
The guest, whatever she may have said, was white!
I thought it was Dorothy Thompson, I declare,
The woman was so thorough in her raving,
Possessing a blueprint perfect in its way
For Negroes’ wartime thinking and behaving.
But it was not Dorothy Thompson after all
But only a Christian woman with a place,
A fine place, with a Jewish firm who thought,
She had the right to lecture to my race.
circa 1943
40
Oh can a Negro chant a hymn
And say, My task is yours
Oh fill my glass up to the brim,
This war, white man, is ours.
Oh can he feel as white men do,
He’s fighting over there,
To save some precious thing and true
From dire destruction here?
Oh Lord, help us to understand,
For us, can it be sin
Not to feel smart and over grand
When battles white men win?
Oh Lord, grant us a ray of light,
For this we surely need,
Black children groping in the night
Of Christian chaos and greed.
We want to live as white men live,
Oh even as they do—
But let us not ourselves deceive
“To thine own self be true.”
In wartime there are basic rights,
We can’t give up, oh Lord,
So help us to discern the lights,
According to thy word.
circa 1943
41
No lady of the land will praise my book.
It would not even be brought to her attention,
By those advising where and how to look
For items which make favorable mention.
Because my writings are not party stuff,
For those who follow the old trodden track.
There are nothing of the tricks—the whine and bluff,
Which make politicians jump to slap your back!
Because I show the Negro stripped of tricks,
As classic as a piece of African art,
Without the frills and mask of politics,
But a human being cast to play a part.
A human being standing at the bar
Of life with face turned upward to a star.
circa 1943
42
One-tenth of India remains untouchable
And one-tenth of people in the United States,
For centuries remote, immutable,
One-tenth of India stand outside the gates.
It is not the conquering European nation,
That holds these people down in dark disgrace,
They are outlawed in this disgusting station
By the people of their own color and race.
We can say: After all, we’re not so bad
Our untouchables are such an alien folk,
Hard to assimilate, ’tis very sad,
But nothing like India’s untouchable yoke.
All nations have their problems: we have too
What may be called a national taboo!
circa 1943
43
Oh, let us have a real good time tonight!
I heard a hectic-voiced acquaintance say,
Go where the people and the lights are bright
To have a good time in a cabaret.
Just not to be a cold shower I went along,
For the cabaret I loved many years ago,
Its music and its laughter and its song,
And other things that make the life blood glow.
But I am afraid that I was a cold shower,
The gaily-colored lights I could not bear—
I liked the lifting joy of youth in flower
Bubbling like French champagne with éclat there:
Yet the entire performance left me cold,
Oh, I’m afraid that I am growing old!
circa 1943
44 (Harlem’s Voice)
In “kingdom,” occult haunt and cabaret
In Harlem, thousands seek surcease from woe,
And sing and shout and dance, confess and pray
That Heaven its gifts upon them may bestow:
The good pure food eventually to eat,
And transformation to angelic state,
With golden slippers for their swarthy feet,
To strut in ecstasy through Heaven’s gate:
“For you have got a robe and we have none
To walk into and over God’s big Heaven—”
It matters not. In Heaven all are one,
And sins of white and sins of black forgiven.
And many who hear the laughter and the song,
All wise and perfect in their subtlety,
Imagine that the Negro feels no wrong,
Contented in his abject misery.
It is an ancient way of slaves to sing,
Where they are huddled deep down in life’s lap,
And Harlem’s voice may rise from suffering
To startle the nation like a thunder clap.
circa 1943
45 (Sufi Abdul Hamid)
Oh how they wrapped them in a maze of lies,
To tag the name Black Hitler upon you—
Wealthy and sinister whites whose raucous cries,
Inflame the nation with all things untrue.
The Negro papers and the Negro writers
They bought and set them at your heels like hounds,
Because you urged the Negroes to be fighters,
Even though they lose all of a hundred rounds!
Poor Negro! The white papers, lawyers, judges,
All ganged together, pushed you to your grave,
Because your name was Arab and their grudges
Foredoomed your crucifixion as a knave.
Because you cried, white men, you always rob
My people, give them now a decent job!
circa 1943
The American white man is so vastly vain
And puffed up in conceit of pride and virtue,
Imagines that his victim in the main
Should thankful be when he has most crassly hurt you.
He wants the Negro to soft-soap his back,
With, “Thank you, Massa, you are very kind,
After stretching me so taut upon the rack
To leave some strength to scrub you down behind.”
He thinks he is the paragon of creation,
That God has destined for the world to rule,
And every creature of every other nation,
Should bow low down to him and be his footstool.
And God! to justify his damnable case,
He has many back scratchers of the Negro race!
circa 1943
47
They hate me, black and white, for I am never
Afraid to say exactly what I think,
They hate me because I think, and will forever,
Of the common Negro wallowing in the sink
Of white and black men’s dirt! Because I say
That American Negroes must be saved as one,
A unit, for there is no other way,
The better Negroes cannot rise alone.
They who imagine they can save their soul
By thinking white and hating black will find
That in the end they cannot attain their goal;
For though they see, yet they are really blind.
We will be lifted up with our own masses,
Or be kept down as slaves by the white classes.
circa 1943
It was the white man’s way to build together,
Each group of them that came to this fair land,
In summertime or stormy winter weather,
They strove and marched together, hand in hand.
It was that way they beat the Indian.
Over great forests and prairie lands they tramped
Until they loomed over all—the conquering man,
And from Maine to California had camped.
And those who followed where others moved before,
Adopted the same plan, first to unite,
When as immigrants they landed on this shore,
And found life was a bitter, uphill fight.
In many years of unabated strife,
The white man fought like hell to save his life.
circa 1943
49
And no white liberal is the Negro’s friend,
Who says there is other than the classic road,
For him to take his interests to defend
And follow and help down his heavy load.
What waste of time to cry: “No Segregation!”
When Negroes thus are in reality,
In North and South, throughout the entire nation,
Where white men grimly hold authority.
Must fifteen million blacks be satisfied,
When one of them can enter as a guest,
In a white house, with all the others denied
The right to have a place of decent rest?
Oh Segregation is not at all the sin
The Negroes need salvation from within.
1945
Oh Marcus Garvey! They who hated you
Like hell have now embalmed you in a book,
Your words that made them squirm from yellow to blue,
They have now placed into a special nook
Of culture, for the poor professors who think
That life must be reduced to fit a classroom,
Where they may very neatly trim and link,
And examine it as an Egyptian tomb!
But Marcus Garvey, your performance was
Beyond professors, flashing like a light,
Or stinging venomously like the buzz
Of a thousand wasps aroused in angry flight!
And nothing that the professors do can sever
You from the people to whom you belong forever.
circa 1943
51
When the dictators set them up as Gods
To solve the riddle of wealth and poverty,
I thought of Jesus who was scourged with rods,
And died that human beings might be free
Of men who posed as Gods to rule mankind.
I thought of Jesus and the Pagan world,
To which he said: Can the blind lead the blind?
And boldly the flag of Christian life unfurled.
My Lord and Master of the Earth to whom
The men who would be Gods are nothing new,
Who died to break them and radiant over the tomb
Proclaimed the Gospel militant and true,
My pagan life of arrogance and dross,
I lay down humbly at the foot of your cross.
1945
In Ethiopia there are black Jews,
Who imagine they are the real original.
To Temple, Prophets, Talmud, they have no clues,
And primitive live even as since Adam’s fall.
Of Judaism they know the Pentateuch,
But modern Judaism is as strange
To them even as the Gospel of St. Luke—
Black tribe of Israel on the African range!
Black intellectuals of this aware,
Have manufactured the conceit supreme,
That Jews have Negro ancestry and dare
Discover meaning in this ungodly dream.
What fools! Some say from apes descended man,
Which makes not man a monkey in God’s plan.
circa 1943
53
And also Negro writers are being made
By Communists who are capable of all things,
For the new miracle men are not afraid
Of fitting Pegasus too with phoney wings!
Why, Negro talent to them is another whore,
But only cheaper than the other bitches
The Communists have used so hard before
And kicked to hell when ready to make their switches.
Lawd, I see marching on line upon line,
The Communist dominated Satan’s hosts,
And snorting on their trace the Gaderene swine,
Gone wild and crazy from the unholy ghosts,
And chasing hither, thither in hot prime,
Scattering everywhere their stench and slime.
circa 1943