G. Douglas Johnson; Crisis, March 1917

OH, black man, why do you northward roam and leave all the farmlands bare?
Is your house not war, tightly thatched from storm, and a larger replete your share?
And have you not schools fit with books and with tools, the steps of your young to guide?
Then–what do you seek in the North cold and bleak, ‘mid the whirl of its teeming tide?

I have toiled in your cornfields and parched in the sun, I have bowed beneath your load of care;
I have patiently garnered your bright golden grain in seasons of storm and fair;
I have lifted a smile to your glowering gloom while my wounded heart, quivering, bled;
Trailing mute in your wake as your rosy-dawns break, I have curtained the mound of my dead.

While my children are taught in the schools you have wrought, they are blind to the sheen of the sky,
For the brand of your hand casts a pall o’er the land that enshadows the gleam of the eye.
My sons deftly sapped of the brawn-hood of man, self-rejected and impotent stand;
My daughters unhaloed, unhonored, undone, feed the lust of a dominant land.

Unstrange is the pathway to Calvary’s Hill,–oft I wend in my dumb agony
Up its perilous height, in the pale morning light, to dissever my own from the tree.
I would not remember, yet cannot forget, how to hearts beating true to your own,
You’ve tortured, and wounded, and filtered their blood, ’til a budding Hegira has blow.

And, so I’m away where the sky-line of day lifts the arch of its rain-bow on high–
From the land of my birth, where the low mounds of earth lift their impotent arms to the sky.
For the soul of me years with a passion that burns for the reach of the ultimate star
In the land of the North, where the leaven of worth flings the infinite portals ajar!