The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Book of American Negro Poetry by Edited by James Weldon Johnson

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Title: The Book of American Negro Poetry

Author: Edited by James Weldon Johnson

Release Date: April 10, 2004 [EBook #11986]

Language: English

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THE BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO POETRY

Chosen and Edited
With An Essay On The Negro's Creative Genius

by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

Author of "Fifty Years and Other Poems"

1922 Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., New York

Printed in the U.S.A. by the Quinn & Boden Company, Rahway, N.J.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
  A Negro Love Song
  Little Brown Baby
  Ships That Pass in the Night
  Lover's Lane
  The Debt
  The Haunted Oak
  When de Co'n Pone's Hot
  A Death Song

JAMES EDWIN CAMPBELL
  Negro Serenade
  De Cunjah Man
  Uncle Eph's Banjo Song
  Ol' Doc' Hyar
  When Ol' Sis' Judy Pray
  Compensation

JAMES D. CORROTHERS
  At the Closed Gate of Justice
  Paul Laurence Dunbar
  The Negro Singer
  The Road to the Bow
  In the Matter of Two Men
  An Indignation Dinner
  Dream and the Song

DANIEL WEBSTER DAVIS
  'Weh Down Souf
  Hog Meat

WILLIAM H. A. MOORE
  Dusk Song
  It Was Not Fate

W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS
  A Litany of Atlanta

GEORGE MARION McCLELLAN
  Dogwood Blossoms
  A Butterfly in Church
  The Hills of Sewanee
  The Feet of Judas

WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
  Sandy Star and Willie Gee
    I. Sculptured Worship
    II. Laughing It Out
    III. The Exit
    IV. The Way
    V. Onus Probandi
  Del Cascar
  Turn Me to My Yellow Leaves
  Ironic: LL.D
  Scintilla
  Sic Vita
  Rhapsody

GEORGE REGINALD MARGETSON
  Stanzas from The Fledgling Bard and the Poetry Society

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
  O Black and Unknown Bards
  Sence You Went Away
  The Creation
  The White Witch
  Mother Night
  O Southland
  Brothers
  Fifty Years

JOHN WESLEY HOLLOWAY
  Miss Melerlee
  Calling the Doctor
  The Corn Song
  Black Mammies

LESLIE PINCKNEY HILL
  Tuskegee
  Christmas at Melrose
  Summer Magic
  The Teacher

EDWARD SMYTH JONES
  A Song of Thanks

RAY G. DANDRIDGE
  Time to Die
  'Ittle Touzle Head
  Zalka Peetruza
  Sprin' Fevah
  De Drum Majah

FENTON JOHNSON
  Children of the Sun
  The New Day
  Tired
  The Banjo Player
  The Scarlet Woman

R. NATHANIEL DETT
  The Rubinstein Staccato Etude

GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON
  The Heart of a Woman
  Youth
  Lost Illusions
  I Want to Die While You Love Me
  Welt
  My Little Dreams

CLAUDE McKAY
  The Lynching
  If We Must Die
  To the White Fiends
  The Harlem Dancer
  Harlem Shadows
  After the Winter
  Spring in New Hampshire
  The Tired Worker
  The Barrier
  To O. E. A
  Flame-Heart
  Two-an'-Six

JOSEPH S. COTTER, JR.
  A Prayer
  And What Shall You Say
  Is It Because I Am Black?
  The Band of Gideon
  Rain Music
  Supplication

ROSCOE C. JAMISON
  The Negro Soldiers

JESSIE FAUSET
  La Vie C'est la Vie
  Christmas Eve in France
  Dead Fires
  Oriflamme
  Oblivion

ANNE SPENCER
  Before the Feast of Shushan
  At the Carnival
  The Wife-Woman
  Translation
  Dunbar

ALEX ROGERS
  Why Adam Sinned
  The Rain Song

WAVERLEY TURNER CARMICHAEL
  Keep Me, Jesus, Keep Me
  Winter Is Coming

ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON
  Sonnet

CHARLES BERTRAM JOHNSON
  A Little Cabin
  Negro Poets

OTTO LEYLAND BOHANAN
  The Dawn's Awake!
  The Washer-Woman

THEODORE HENRY SHACKLEFORD
  The Big Bell in Zion

LUCIAN B. WATKINS
  Star of Ethiopia
  Two Points of View
  To Our Friends

BENJAMIN BRAWLEY
  My Hero
  Chaucer

JOSHUA HENRY JONES, JR.
  To a Skull

PREFACE

There is, perhaps, a better excuse for giving an Anthology of American Negro Poetry to the public than can be offered for many of the anthologies that have recently been issued. The public, generally speaking, does not know that there are American Negro poets—to supply this lack of information is, alone, a work worthy of somebody's effort.

Moreover, the matter of Negro poets and the production of literature by the colored people in this country involves more than supplying information that is lacking. It is a matter which has a direct bearing on the most vital of American problems.

A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

The status of the Negro in the United States' is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.

Is there likelihood that the American Negro will be able to do this? There is, for the good reason that he possesses the innate powers. He has the emotional endowment, the originality and artistic conception, and, what is more important, the power of creating that which has universal appeal and influence.

I make here what may appear to be a more startling statement by saying that the Negro has already proved the possession of