Clara M. Marcelle Bramlette (Chicago); Chicago Defender, September 22, 1917
Uncle Sam is calling us to fight. See[?] "Our gallant boys" are rallying, one and all: Even though they're often CHEATED of their right-- They are willing to obey their country's call!
R. P. Player; Chicago Defender, September 22, 1917
[missing lines will be filled in]
I see ten thousand restless souls
Give up their daily toil;
I hear ten million voices speak
As if in great turmoil.
The nation’s asking why this stir,
And why this host’s all fired;
The answer comes from far and near,
The Negro’s getting tired.
Edna Perry Booth (Brooklyn, NY); Chicago Defender, February 2, 1918
“They have taken my boy a prisoner;
My boy, who is all my pride.
Who when only a little shaver,
Stood close at my knee and cried
Because he had found in the meadow,
Near the edge of the bubbling spring,
A bird, with its breast all crimsoned,
And a pitiful broken wing.
Orlando C. W. Taylor (New Orleans); Chicago Defender, February 2, 1918
To the dreamer, alone, though the crowd was dense,
Came dreams of a fortune great–
The liveried servant, the mansion tall,
The gold, the silver plate.
Then he awoke to the world of things,
And dreaming did eschew;
He hid himself in a mass of work,
And lo! his dreams came true.
Alexander W. Curtis Jr. (Chicago); Indianapolis Freeman, March 9, 1901
In that dreadful, cursed Sunflower State,
A Negro met an undeserving fate,
By the hands of a cowardly, cut-throat band,
Who desires to exterminate the Negroes in this land.
J. Riley Dungee; Houston Informer, April 14, 1931
With rumors of revolting crime,
The public is enraged;
And in its retribution is
Indignantly engaged.
The despicable criminal
Conceived his guilt and hid it
Behind the sordid sentiment,
“Of course, a Negro did it.”
Anonymous; New York Amsterdam News, May 1, 1929
“I slept. I dreamed, I seemed to climb a hard, ascending track.
And just behind me labored one whose face was black.
I pitied him, but hour by hour he gained upon my path.
He stood beside me, stood upright, and then I turned in wrath.
‘Go back,’ I cried, ‘what right have you to stand beside me here?’
I paused, struck dumb with fear, for lo! the black man was not there–
But Christ stood in his place!
And oh! the pain, the pain, the pain that looked from that dear face.”
William H. Maxwell; New York Amsterdam News, May 28, 1930
Cruel and cold is Old Man Lynch,
Brutal beyond compare;
Devoid of reason, Old Man Lynch,
Leading mobs that do not care.
Josie D. Heard; Colored American Magazine, April 1907:
“There’s a Samson lying, sleeping in the land,
He shall soon awake and with avenging hand,
In an all unlooked for hour,
He will rise in mighty power;
What dastard can his righteous rage withstand?
Townsend Allen; Colored American Magazine, August 1903:
Ay, black was the man, and black was the deed,
But blacker by far was the lawless creed
Of those lawless men with their faces white
Who avenged the deed in the dead of night!
