That won’t do no good.

Only white men digs coal there.

I got to walk a mile, two miles, further,

Where the black man can dig coal.

The United Mine Workers

Is one of the best or-gan-IZ-a-tions there is.

United means union,

And union means united.

But they’s mines runnin’ twenty-five years

And the white man never lets the negro in.

I remember when we was tryin’ to organize.

We met in barns an’ holes,

We met in the jungles.

I used to go to all the meetin’s them days.

Now we meet downtown in a hall.

Now we’s recognized by everybody

Fur one of the most powerful or-gan-IZ-a-tions

in the United States.

I don’t go to meetin’s nowadays

But if they’s a cause to strike for I’ll strike.

I’d live in the fields on hard corn for a just cause.

Yes, for a just cause I’d live in the fields

On hard corn.

Nigger

I am the nigger.

Singer of songs,

Dancer . . .

Softer than fluff of cotton . . .

Harder than dark earth

Roads beaten in the sun

By the bare feet of slaves . . .

Foam of teeth … breaking crash of laughter . . .

Red love of the blood of woman,

White love of the tumbling pickaninnies . . .

Lazy love of the banjo thrum . . .

Sweated and driven for the harvest-wage,

Loud laughter with hands like hams,

Fists toughened on the handles,

Smiling the slumber dreams of old jungles,

Crazy as the sun and dew and dripping, heaving life of the jungle,

Brooding and muttering with memories of shackles:

I am the nigger.

Look at me.

I am the nigger.

Man, the Man-Hunter

I saw Man, the man-hunter,

Hunting with a torch in one hand

And a kerosene can in the other,

Hunting with guns, ropes, shackles.

I listened

And the high cry rang.

The high cry of Man, the man-hunter:

We’ll get you yet,youSon of a Bitch!

I listened later,

The high cry rang:

Kill him! kill him!the Judean equivalentthe Son of a Bitch!

In the morning the sun saw

Two butts of something, a smoking rump,

And a warning in charred wood:

Well, we got him,

theSon of a Bitch.

Poet of the People

Sandburg would become the Poet of the People Whitman had hoped to be, in large part because he encountered Whitman’s work at a crucial time in his own journey toward creative identity and expression. Whitman gave him a model for social idealism, poetry, the life of the soul.

— PENELOPE NIVEN, from Carl Sandburg: A Biography

I Am the People, the Mob

I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.

Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?

I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.

I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.