AFRICAN-AMERICANS

In his constant concern about the poor and disinherited in American society, Sandburg often wrote about African-Americans. This section contains a selection of these poems, several of which are dramatic portraits. They are wide-ranging in content, from “Jazz Fantasia,” reflecting the poet’s interest in music; to the fiery words of the ex-slave Sojourner Truth; to a folk prayer from Lang Syne Plantation in South Carolina; to a short poem about a simple woman called Cleo with her poetical evocation of angels; to the prophetess standing on Chicago street corners warning of destruction; to the much-abused Elizabeth Umpstead; and, finally, to the pro-union man Henry Stephens. In this series of portraits of African-Americans, common folk living in both country and urban settings, Sandburg shows some of them content with their lives and others defiant. Together, these poems offer stunning and diverse images of African-Americans.

In his pamphlet on the 1919 Chicago race riots and in the poem “Hoodlums” (included in the Poems of Protest section), Sandburg wrote about this terrible episode in Chicago history, in which thirty-eight people died, fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks. He understood the part that poverty played in white hatred and fear of African-Americans, and he knew that government did not protect its citizens of color. He wrote, “On the one hand we have blind lawless government failing to function through policemen ignorant of Lincoln, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and a theory sanctioned and baptized in a storm of red blood. . . . And on the other hand we have a gaunt involuntary poverty from which issues the hoodlum.”

Sandburg denounced white hoodlums in “Man, the Man-Hunter.” This unexpurgated poem about a lynching was sent to Louis Untermeyer in 1920 for inclusion in his anthology An American Miscellany. Afraid that the language in the poem would offend both church groups and the Society for the Suppression of Vice, Untermeyer asked Sandburg to make revisions. Sandburg agreed to remove the offending language, but he wrote Untermeyer in March 1920:

. . . it’s come over me clear the last two or three years that in a group killing of a man, in a mobbing, the event reaches a point where all rationale is gone; such a term as “anarchist” and “traitor” or “Boche” or “Englander Schwein” disappears and they babble hysterically only one or two epithets, in our language usually a tenor of “Son of a Bitch” with a bass of “Cocksucker.” Since some of the finest blood of the human family goes this way poets and painters have a right to try to employ it or at least not kid themselves about what actually happened at Golgotha. Since I’ve talked with men who were in the trenches and since I’ve seen race riots I am suspicious that the sponge of vinegar on the spear is a faked legend and what probably happened, if the historicity of Jesus is ever established, is that they cut off his genital organ and stuck it in his mouth. . . .