Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/182

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
160
NEGRO POETS AND THEIR POEMS

By way of indicating the idealistic aspirations of the colored people I gave at the end of Chapter I. J. Mord Allen’s Miss Jessie Redmon Fauset poem The Psalm of the Uplift. For the same purpose I will give here, at the end of this chapter, a poem of the very present day from one of the most accomplished young women of the Negro race. Besides its intrinsic merit as a poem it has the further recommendation for a place in this chapter that it celebrates a woman of the black race who was the very embodiment of its noblest qualities—illiterate slave though she was. It is a splendid testimonial to her people of this later day that Negro literature is filled with tributes to Sojourner Truth. She was indeed a wonderful woman, altogether worthy to be ranked with the noble heroines of biblical story. From a Negro historian I take the following restrained account of her:[1]

  1. A Short History of the American Negro. By Benjamin Brawley. The Macmillan Company.