My poetry, my life

While it's certainly a pleasure to come again to this campus to read my poems because it was on this campus that I first read my poems in the Bay Area 30 years ago. Awful long time ago. I guess everybody even the graduate students have not graduated or they hear that in reading my part as I have been doing for a long time now. I tried to show how Portree is related to life. I know that in a college humanities like this you don't have the conception that many Americans do that 40 something way off in the skies somewhere. I'm sure you know that it isn't. Certainly in my own case my own forms are I think very much down to earth. They are forms of grown right out of my own live out of places I've been and things I've done and people I've known the

way I think and feel about things and so in reading them to you I'm going to give you something of their background. I'm going to start at the very beginning with my own. Orig. which took place in a town called Joplin Missouri but I belong to a family that was always moving and I was supposed to have been barn in Guthrie Oklahoma but we moved about a week before and so I was barn in the Zura and then we moved all around the Middle West. As a child I lived in a great many different towns and knew mostly I knew best. Lawrence Kansas where my grandmother lived and ever so often I lived with her for a lot of WA and so I sort of grew up in the very heart of our country in the very middle of the United States. I never thought about being a writer's job at all never dreamed of trying to write poetry or anything else. I wanted to be a street car conductor.

We went to so many different towns and never had enough nickels drag them to the ends of our car lines. But when I was 13 we moved from Lawrence to a town called Uncle Noi and it was this change in residence that brought about a very big change in my life. We moved in the late fall. I was several weeks late entering the eighth grade graduating class and the grammar school in this new town and on the day that I went into this go the pupils were talking about holding a class election. It seems they've heard the high school graduating class at officers of the eighth grade want to have them too and the teacher was explaining to the class the qualifications up. The officer should have a president should not run a meeting and the secretary at least know how to write and so on and when she got down to the office of class poit she stressed rhythm over and over she mentioned the word rhythm. Well the election

was the next day. On the way home school I walked along with the one other Negro people in the class the girl and she said to me we don't need to worry about the so class selection she said. They never like colored just anything these ghouls here. Well she was just about right she told me it was a prejudiced little town and it was at that time of the kind of town where if you were colored and wanted to go to the movies you had to sit in the last row on the left which had only about 10 seats and those 10 seats were for no other colored people to go to the movies that night. Well at any rate I wasn't worried about being nominated or elected to anything the craft because I was brand new in the school in the Kerr to me that they would let me do anything. However the next day when the elections were being how nobody nominated a colored girl for anything she'd been with them through all the eighth grade. All the officers present secretary right on down to the sergeant at arms had been nominated and elected except the class point that was went on the bottom of the board. When they got out of that office there weren't any nominations. And the youngsters

looked all around each other and nobody even looked like he or she could write a poem in the room. So they wanted to make sport and fun of the teacher said well you do want a class point don't you and everybody said yes. He said well you have to nominate somebody. Have to nominate somebody she said whereupon a little white boy got up turned around looked at me call my name on the whole class unanimously. And that's the way I became a poit by unanimous. Unanimous activation of the eighth grade when I don't want to be cast for it either. I was a little bit. Look put out that they had made me the class poet so I began to wonder why you know I thought about it rather seriously that night and then it I remembered how the teachers just rhythm and I recall that all my life and I had heard that practically all white people think that all Negroes can sing and dance and that all of us have a sense of rhythm when of

course that's not 100 percent true by any means. Insofar as singing goes I am one negro that can even carry a tune I was excused from music all the way through high school. I threw everybody else off key but the concept of negroes and rhythms seemed to go together I think in the minds of those children. And so when they finally decided well they had to have a class for it they thought about rhythm they turned around looked at me and made me the passport. Well I'm glad they did because ever since then I've been writing. I had all winter long to write my first poem. So by the time spring came around graduation time this point was just about the longest point I've ever written even up to now 16 16 pages long on that one. When I read it at graduation it's a wonder anybody really liked it but they seem to do the parents the teachers the students everybody applauded so loudly. And that was the

first applause I had ever had in my life. They applauded so loudly that I was greatly pleased by this attention. And so ever since then I've been writing and reading poetry. Well now the next year high school where we had a very good high school magazine and during the summer we moved again we moved to Cleveland Ohio. I began to write for this magazine and my first point of published in my high school magazine. Right on through college I wrote for the college publications. I was class part in high school again. In college I was a class lyricist. And so my literary career is really very much tied up with my academic background and. One teacher in particular in high school. I am a very great debt of gratitude. In fact I think all of our pupils do and out of her classes came a number of riders. She had to be a teacher who liked contemporary poetry. Now of course that wouldn't be too unusual today. But when I was in high school it seemed that

the teachers liked only poets who lived at least a hundred years or 200 before the students use it and they never seem to read to us from anybody living or wrote about anything that we knew. But this teacher did. She would read to us from the primes of that really masters of and invent some other way of Carl Sandburg. All of whom were where poets living and writing in our own time American Poets. And I particularly like Carl Sandburg. So when I began to try to write poetry seriously I wrote on the one hand like Carl Sandburg in free verse and on the other hand like Art tried to write like tolerance Dunbar the great Negro poet who had died when I was just about time I was born I guess but his points were in every neighborhood home in the Middle West when I was a child. Now you know that Dunbar wrote in a kind of singing lyrical farm and used very often Negro dialect had a lot of humor in these parts. And Sandberg wrote entirely in an rhymed

free verse to quote opposite influences. Well I'll read you two of my high school poems. The first one to be published in my high school magazine and it's in the manor pollens Dunbar. It goes like this. I have my clothes cleaned just like new upon a mom but it still feels blue. I bought a new hat she OS fine but I wish I had back that old gal I'm on. I got new shoes. They don't hurt my feet. But I ain't got nobody to call me sweet. Pretty sad that one isn't. Well. About a year or two later I wrote this point in which you can plainly see the Sandburg influence I think and also you can detect the influence of the Negro spirituals in the little refrain on the point. I wasn't aware of the influence of Negro folk songs

on my work at that time I don't and in fact I know I wasn't. But nevertheless it seemed to have been there. This is a prime call when Sue wears red. It's about a very beautiful brown skin girl who had come up from the solve. And one of those great migrations of Negro workers. After the First World War and up she'd come into our school and she used to wear very often a red dress and walk down the hall as a pretty red dress. So I tried to describe her. I was too shy to put a real name on the point. The name wasn't Sue but this is the way the point goes. When Susanna Jones wears red her face is like an ancient cameo turned brown by the ages. Come with a blast of trumpets Jesus and Susanna Jones wears a red queen from some time daddy Gyptian walks once again with trumpets Jesus and the beauty of Susanna Jones and burns in my heart a love sharp like pain

sweet silver trumpets. Jesus that's the way I felt every time I saw that girl in those days. But she didn't marry me she married somebody else as soon as she graduated high school and the last time I was back home in Cleveland I heard that she's been married four times since then. While my father who lived in Mexico City sent for me to come down there when I came out of high school he had gone away from this country because he didn't like the color line here. He wanted to be a lawyer's a young man and it seemed there was no place in the part of the country where you live that negroes could study law they wouldn't let you study law. So he took it by correspondence or correspondence courses got ready to take the examination for the bar and it seemed then they wouldn't even let me go take the examination for the bar in Oklahoma are Missouri I've forgotten which state at the time. And so he was put out by this to go away to another country. He

became a lawyer in Mexico City and practiced there for more than 30 years. And when I got on to Mexico City my father being a lawyer at that time for mining interests wanted me to be a mining engineer. He got my career all cut out for me. He said I'm going to send you to switch from the college and switch and you can take mining engineering and you can also learn three languages at once. Switching and you see the triangle country that talian German and French I believe. And then you he said you won't have to live and fight against prejudice in the United States you can live anywhere in the world you want to. Well I don't want to go switch in the colleges and want to be a mining engineer and I didn't want to learn three languages at once either. I wanted to go to Harlem. I've never seen Harlem and I began to read a great deal about that center of Negro life and culture. I knew that if I told my father I wanted to go to Harlem he would never get there at least not with his help because he didn't see any sense negroes

living in this country at all and let me come back here. Well I finally was able to persuade him that Columbia University had a very good college leading to engineering school and I would take subjects leading to engineering to go if he let me go to Columbia. Well he finally consented so I went to Columbia and I did take trigonometry in physics and chemistry and some other studies that I didn't do very well. So at the end of my freshman year in college. By that time I'd had two or three my points published in the crisis the negro magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Dr. Dubois was my first editor the first person to publish my points outside of school. And one or two other magazines taken little points of mine. And so I wanted to be a writer I really seriously thought of that as a career by this time and I wrote my father and told him I made up my mind to be a writer. If you didn't approve of my plans why he need not send me

anymore money well it soon became obvious that he didn't approve because. He didn't mean other penny and I found myself in June when classes were out with only $13. Well I had to find a job right away of course and find a place to stay so I went down to Harlem this Harlem that I wanted to live in so much this was my chance. Seven dollars a half a week for a room rent half of my money gone for just one week's rent which was high at that time. And I learned. That in the ghetto sections of our big American cities even the grown and large take advantage of the fact that you can't rant all over town like other people can if you're colored and they charge you just a little bit more. I also learned when I set out to make my own living by my father going away to another country least I understood it better because I bought the morning papers in New York.

I got up bright and early 6:00 o'clock one morning a lot of ads in the papers help wanted no depression at that time and I thought with a high school education a year of college that I could at least be an office boy or falling clerk or something like that. And so I picked out those kinds of ads to answer and in every single office I was turned down usually politely invasively the job then failed or must be some mistake we don't need anyone but in a number of our offices I was told quite frankly Oh we're sorry but we don't hire Negroes here. No colored people work in this office. We don't have a porter's job here. And I began to find out that there just saw Owens of ordinary jobs that white people at least may apply for without anyone being astonished. But if you're colored they're surprised you know. Well that condition I must say has changed. Greatly and in our larger northern cities and I think in the western cities too like San Francisco but 25 years or more ago

negroes were mostly expected to be Puerto shoeshine boys or errand boys or elevator boys or waiters or something like that. Not a day of course in New York you see colored girl clerks and lard and tailors are Macy's in my publisher's offices I see Negroes to Niagara first Negro office boys. So I'm very happy to say that in the bigger cities the conditions have changed but they haven't. By and large all across the heart of our country you walk down the main street and see a town like Omaha Nebraska and you just never see a girl clerk in a shop or a Negro teller in the banks or anything. So I think these poems that I wrote at that time about the problems of earning a living if you're colored. I think they're still valid by and large for most of our country. I read you just one of them. This is a poem called The elevator boy goes like this. I got a job now running an elevator and the denizen hotel in Jersey job ain't no good though. No money around jobs or just chances like

everything else. Maybe a little luck now. Maybe not. Maybe a good job sometimes step out of the barrel boy. Two new suits and a lot of money. Maybe no luck for a long time. Only the elevators going up and down up and down are somebody else's shoes to shine or greasy parts in the dirty kitchen. I've been runnin this elevator too long I guess of quit now. So the fellow quits that elevator job goes and gets a job running an elevator somewhere else but at least he has a change of scenery. I decided after several months of working at doll jobs that wouldn't leave any place at all low pay to get a job on a boat. So I went down to the waterfront and after several weeks of walking up and down the dock front I finally got a job on a boat.

Well here's a poem that I wrote at that time called waterfront streets about those ugly dock Front streets that never the less I have about them. A feeling of romance in far off places. This little Lyric tries to put into verse the way that I felt at that time. The spring is not so beautiful there. But dream ships sail away to where the spring is wondrous rare and life is gay. The spring is not so beautiful there but lads put out to see who carry beauties in their hearts and dreams like me. Well one of my dreams have always been to see Africa the motherland of the Negro people. I never hope to really get that far away. But I had the good luck to find myself working on a boat going to Africa my very first job at sea. We went all up and down the west coast

up the Congo River and up the Niger River and almost down to Cape Town in the south and then we came back up the west coast and then to the Canary Islands before we came home. So I had a view of all of one side of Africa and that trip greatly influenced my thinking my work my writing. For one thing I acquired a new pride in my own racial background. When I was a child the geographies always pictured Africans as a frightful savage bushy headed people you know. I'm glad to say that that picture of the primitive peoples has changed in textbooks in our time but a long time ago they always pictured them as completely savage and frightful people. While I found the Africans weren't that way at all. Even way up the Congo River the the tribes up there that were almost nothing except a lawn cloth were nevertheless as polite as kind to strangers as people are here. They seem to me just about as civilized people are here. Those are good. Speak English or had

access to interpreters were interested in problems and things going on in our country and a great many of them even had heard about Harlem and so I like the Africans and I wrote a number of pardons during And shortly after that trip up. I will read you just one of them. I'll read you the shortest one of them a poem call of my people. The night is beautiful. I saw the faces of my people the stars are beautiful so the eyes of my people are beautiful also. Is the sun beautiful also. Are the souls of my people. I learned in Africa that our country is certainly not the only country with a color problem that color problems existed right in

Africa itself. I saw to my surprise in the very first part to which our ship went. Signs up outside of restaurants and other public places that said Europeans only. And I learned that those signs really meant white people only. All up and down the African coast dice of various forms of discrimination between the Europeans who ran the African colonies and the African people themselves and in one company I even saw a missionary church with a brass rail across the middle of the church and the white people were bringing Christianity to the natives all sat in front of the brass rail and the Africans themselves were segregated behind the brass rail. Well I sort of wanted to see the Europe that ran Africa. And so when I came back I got a job on a boat going across to Europe a boat going to Rotterdam. This trip to Europe was quite different however. In point of comfort on the African

trip the African trip had been made and whether we came back in the early fall before the ocean got too rough. But my first trip across the Atlantic in the winter was an extremely rough one. A little freight boat that I was working on was not too much longer than there's room very small boat so it rocked and tossed and rolled all the way across the Atlantic. We should have made the trip in 10 days it took us 17. The second trip was even worse. When we made the second trip across one of the. Biggest d'armes in the history of the shipping it seems came up and we were 22 days getting from New York to Rotterdam and every one of those 22 days the boat rocked and rolls of that as your whole body got sore just trying to hold your balance you know. And some nights if you wanted to be sure of being in your bunk in the morning you had to tie yourself in because of the lurching of the boat. Some very unfortunate things happen to you on that trip. The chief engineer got pneumonia. If you get seriously

ill on a freight boat there are no doctors and so if you get very sick there's nothing to do except go head on and die. This man died. I saw my first funeral at sea. They wrapped your body up in a piece of canvas and put it on a board and then they pushed the board up to the edge of the boat cover you with an American flag and captain says a few words over your body and then they lift up the board and you slide off into the ocean. But they hold on to the flag and put it away for the next hero. One of the boys was severely skull the pot of soup overturned in the galley. Our wireless man lost his mine in mid ocean. We had no use of the wireless and so when this boat finally did get to write it down I thought to myself there might be objects on this little ship it might sink going back and I better get off. So I did. I had $25 coming I wanted to see Paris anyway so I do my $25 and bought a ticket to Paris.

After I'd paid for my visa. Of a few things that had to be done due to cross the border I got to Paris very early one morning in the middle of February with only seven dollars left. While I don't know a soul in all of Europe you know anybody in Paris of all but I thought I knew French quite well because I'd had three years in high school and here at Columbia. And so I was sure that I could find the job quite easily and perils with my command of the language. But it turned out that the very first time out my mouth and tried to order my breakfast at the Blue Fairy in the garden or in the station there and understand a word I say I said. Dunham on days moved to play do John Boehner. And nobody move to give me anything I was. I was trying to order ham and eggs. I didn't realize that the French people don't eat ham and eggs anyway for breakfast but they might have least understood the words I thought.

So I repeated they moved to play do jumbo soup playing Jenga thing. Well I saw the cover you're involving At one end of the counter and some very nice brioche rolls right in front of me. So I planted the coffee and I planted the rolls and right away I got coffee and rolls so I learned my very first day in Paris that you don't really need to know a foreign language in a foreign country if you just use sign language you get almost anything you want except a job I can get a job a sign language. So far over three weeks I lived on coffee and rolls are. Or rather I should say coffee and a roll for a meal because that's all I could afford and I finally found a job as a doorman in a nightclub. There was no salary but you did get your dinner when you went to work and your supper at midnight. So that was a pretty good salary for me at that time as I was I was ante ups of course. However after I'd been working there a few nights I discovered that it was a kind of underworld

gangster type nightclub frequented largely by people from Central Europe and Turkey and Asia Minor and they fought a great deal inside and they fought and all the languages of central Europe and I never quite knew what they were fighting about. But I was supposed to be the Bonser and throw people out. So I didn't stay there very long. I found another job as a second cook in a much more respectable nightclub in fact one that became quite well-known the Grandview. When they asked me could I cook I said yes I really can cook a thing but fortunately for me the title second cook meant dishwasher anyway so it turned out to be a job I could hold. I worked in the ground you in the rupee for some seven months every night washing pots and pans back in the kitchen I used to hear the jazz band playing a very good negro jazz band from New York and the beat of the syncopated music sort of got into my blood and I began to

try to reproduce it in Portree and it was my so-called jazz Poinsett results what the critics call them then that began my professional literary career because these were the first point that I sold the crisis and other magazines were kind enough to publish my poetry of harmony. I didn't pay anything. But now I begin to sell points I got from one magazine as much as 50 cents a line which is just about the top prize you know for part three. And since most of my poems The short the checks wouldn't be very big. So I very early in my poetic career learn to cut my lines in half you know make them short and sometimes. Sometimes you don't and sometimes you only have one word for a lot of your luck. While I would like to read you just one of the points from that period a point in which I tried to capture the rhythms of a dance that was being had already swept America had begun to beat the world. A

dance called the Charleston of the young people I imagine most of you are perhaps not old enough to see in the Charleston but I'm sure if you ask any of your professors to show you they can tell you show you how to do it. I was reading my primes the other day at the University of Kansas and I mentioned the period in the Charleston and so on. And afterwards I was told the chancellor Chancellor Murphy of the University of Kansas was a champion Charleston dancer in his youth and has two or three Charleston cups. So the Charleston was quite an energetic and exciting dance and if you've never seen it as Mr. Parkinson or somebody show you how it goes at any rate I tried to capture something of the rhythms of that dance and this little poem called Negro danseuse. It was just BIN BAKER who really brought the Johnson to perils and became a great international star.

Beginning with her dancing of the Charleston man ma baby got two more ways two more ways to do the Charleston. Two more ways to do this. Giles didn't solve a lot on the tables. Music gay brown skin steppers in a cabaret. White folks white folks pray for me and mob they've got two more ways to my way to do the job done well. Other problems of that period were called to a young dancer Caton a saxophone and this point began to appear in a number of magazines in New York and editors began to know my name and when I got back to this country I had begun myself to be interested in the folk music from which jazz came quite consciously now because I began to sort of go back to the folk sources and all my life I've heard

blues and spirituals and a lot of churches up in the Midwest and in Kansas City. And so I began to try to write poems in the manner of the blues and the spirituals. And I think I will read you one and each style in the manner of the spirituals. I read your poem called Judgment Day. It's I guess like what you might call a shout or a a do believe style. And then I'll read you a blue as the spirituals you know our group songs they are a folk farm that doesn't exist anymore I mean it's an active folk farm any more spiritual as far as I know are no longer coming out of the people no longer being created. The type of song Nol that is similar to the spiritual as a gospel song. And in my opinion it is a folk expression all the gospel songs are written by individuals and sung by singers like Mahalia Jackson and the ward singers. But as the song itself is

so close to the people that I think it can be termed a farm of folk singing but gospel songs are not spirituals. Judgment day. They put my body on the ground. My soul went flying over the town. Lord Jesus went flying to the stars and moon is shouting God was coming soon. Oh jesus lord in heaven crown Anisa says don't be afraid because you ain't dead. Kind Jesus. And now I'm certain clean and bright in the suite of my lord's clean and bright clean and bright. And I'd like to do one other thing which certainly is influenced by the negro religious expression. This little poem grew out of an incident in my childhood very old lady and our church in Lawrence Kansas. Used to come every Sunday morning all dressed up and quite quaint. Cl. you probably

haven't bought a new clothes for 25 30 years and so is your shirt waist with staves up in the collar way up on your chin and a wide skirts with ruffles around the bottom. And sometimes some of the younger people in the church would be inclined to giggle and laugh a little bit of this quaint old lady in her funny clothes. One Sunday morning she heard somebody appear in a make over remark or something about her she started down the church aisle and so she turned around looked at the group of young people sitting there and she said I saw you all can be stuck up if you wanna laugh at me if you want to but my Lord ain't stuck up. Then she went on down to CNN a conic while that line stuck up remained in my subconscious mind for many years I guess and suddenly it came out in a poem a poem is called My lord my lord ain't no stuck up man my lord he ain't proud when

he goes a walk and he gives me his hand. You my friend he lolled my lord knows what it wants to work he knows how to pray. My large life was trouble to trouble every day my Lord ain't no stuck up man. He's a friend of mine. When he went to having his soul on fire he told me I was gone. He said sure you will come with me and be my friend through eternity. And now for a point on the matter of the blows to the blues as you know are quite worldly songs are just the opposite of the spirituals their songs very much about the problems down here on Earth. The Man's Blues. And by the way blues are individual songs not group songs like the spirituals and the men's blues are usually economic blues really they're usually about work or maybe being out of work and broke and hungry are long ways from home and no money to get a ticket with to go back. And the women's blues are almost always about love of very often

the woman's will is about some man who's gone off and left her before she's ready for him to go. I will read you a man's blows. In fact I think I read you one for man one for a woman to blows. This one is called Out of work and you can tell how long ago it was written because it mentions the WPA. So you know it's depression time blues. I walk the streets off my feet. I don't walk the streets or off my feet. I've been looking for a job so that I could eat. I couldn't find no job so I went to the WPA couldn't find no job so I went to the WPA WPA man told me you got to live here are a year and a day. Oh yeah another day Lord in this great big lonesome town or you're in a day in this great big lonesome town.

I might star for a year but that extra day would get me down. I am writing my own poems in the manner of the blues I try to stick as closely as I can to the authentic folk farm and spirit and one of the qualities of the blues is of course that combination of sadness and humor that has gone from the blues over into jazz music. And I think maybe that's why people love our American jazz all around the world because it has that very combination of sadness and humor. Most other popular music is either all happy or all sad you know. But our music combines both. Well this is a blues for a woman to sing. It's called widow woman. All that last long ride is a ride. Everybody must.

Yes that last long rides arrive everybody must take. And that final stop is a stop. Everybody must make when they put you in the ground and they throw dirt in your face as they put you in the ground and throw dirt in your face. That's one time pretty pop up you your day in your place. You was a mighty lover and you ruined me many years. I'm a lover baby. You rheumy many years if I live to be a thousand I'll never dry these tears I Don't Want Nobody Else. And don't nobody else want me I say I don't want nobody else and don't nobody else want me. Yet you never can tell when a woman like me is free. Well. When I got back to the United States from my

travels abroad I worked my way back on a another freighter. I sent a poem of mine to opportunity magazine's first literary contest opportunity was the Journal of the National Urban League. Most of my early publication was in negro publications. Well I won this contest I got the first prize for Portree with this point called the wherry blows and about the same time I was working at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington as a busboy hoping to go to Howard. They wanted me to come to New York to get my prizes and awards banquet. It was $50 so I spent the prize going after it but the publisher resulting from it was of such a nature that Alpha taken off wrote me and asked me if I had enough points to make a book. And. I did have my first book of coins was accepted back and off and published under the title

of the wherry blues. My prize winning point. Well just before this happened into the dining room of the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington one day came by Joel Lindsey our very great American poet whom I had liked and Marge so much had never seen. He was going to be disappointed in the little theatre of the hotel that night. I knew that but I also knew that I could not go to hear him read these pines because that time in Washington colored people didn't go to any of the theaters and all of Washington our national capitol except those in the Negro neighborhoods. Well I went into the pantry when I saw vigilantly come into the dining room at lunch time and wrote down three of my poems including the where he blows and came back into the dining room and put them down beside his plate. He was dining alone and I said I like your poems very much and I try to write for a tree too and here is some Amman one away. Well I don't see vigilance anymore never but the next morning when I went

to work about 6:30 in the morning the head waiter came out of the kitchen he said you're like 10 years and I said yes and he said Well there are newspaper reporters and photographers waiting for you in the dining room. And you know I said well what have I done. Then well I don't know but they're waiting for you in there. So get your uniform on go on in then see what they want so I quickly put on my white uniform and went into the dining room. Some early risers were already having breakfast and I was already dirty dishes sitting around which I was due to remove and here were these reporters and the camera man. They said you've been discovered. And so they then tell me what it was all bought by John Lindsay had read my three fines at his reading and before and the theater of the hotel and had spoken very beautifully about my work and it said that

right there in this hotel he had discovered a poit. And so the newspaper people interviewed me. They took my picture holding up a tray of dirty dishes in the. Middle of the dining room. That interview and that picture went all over the country syndicated by United Press. So that was my first published break and so my literary career was really beginning well. I didn't get to go to Howard I went to Lincoln University. I got a scholarship through my portrait to go finish my three years of college. I was very happy elated to be able to write my father and tell him that you didn't send me through college but we did. I graduated magna 1929 and ever since then I've been making my living as a professional writer. So that is the background for my work and now in closing I would like to read you perhaps half a dozen or so of my more serious poems. I guess I'm best known as a writer of pointers about the problems

of the Negro people in relation to democracy. At least it's those poems of mine that seem to be most most often anthologized and most often reprinted. And for a great many years of course I have been writing such poems. They certainly grew out of the problems that I myself as an individual have faced and have known but in expressing my own personal problems. In this case certainly I express the problems of millions of other colored people. Some critics have called me a social poet and I think that I am. Some of to me a documentary for it. And some of call me a propaganda ploy. Well when they use that word that and mean it very nicely usually but anyway I would admit to being all three at the ready. Seem to make much difference to me what one is called anyway but certainly much of my poetry is social and much of it is a kind of propaganda if you want to say so or our

special pleading for the cause of the negro achieving greater democracy achieving all the rights that other Americans have. The little point of mine that is most often used by race relations groups is one called merry go round and I think maybe this point has been used so much because it presents the race problem very simply through the eyes of a child. It was written during the war. Every time there's a war there's a great migration of Negro workers from the south to the north they come up to work in the war plants and factories. And I imagine in my own mind a little girl of maybe 7 or 8 years old coming up with her family to maybe a town like Oakland or. Could be a port in Oregon or it could be Omaha or could be northern New Jersey and in the northern or western city. This little colored girl goes to a carnival and she sees a merry go

around going around and she wants to ride but remembering the Solve the legal Jim Crow and segregation on the buses and trains and schools and all. She doesn't know whether she can ride on the merry go round or not in a northern town. If you can ride she doesn't know where. So this is what she says. Where is the Jim Crow section on this merry go round Mr. Because I want to ride. Down south where I come from white and colored can sit side by saw it down south on the train. There's a Jim Crow car on the bus. We are put in the back but there ain't no back to a merry go round. Where is the horse for a kid that's black. While of course I feel that our country is big enough and rich enough to have a heart for

every kid and I'm sure someday we will. Another poem of mine is crying about the problems of voting in the deep cell. You know there are some sections of our country where the very basic right of democracy the ballot. If a negro tries to take advantage of it is taking his life in his hands. This poem is called Ku Klux about the Ku Klux Klan. It's what happened to a young man who wanted to vote. He tells in his own words and this is what he sells. They took me out to some lonesome place. They said Do you believe in the great white race. I said mister to tell you the truth I believe in anything if you just turn me loose. The white man said Valmai can it be you are standing there. Assassin me. They hit me in the head and knocked me down and then they kicked me on the ground.

A Klansman said Listen look me in the face and tell me you believe in the great white race. Well of course we fought a war to defeat that sort of race superiority. There is in Europe we have an entirely defeated them by any means in our own country as all of you know. However the extremes of Little Rock and the bombings of schools in Birmingham in Clinton Tennessee. Do not represent all of America nor the feelings of all Americans as we all very well know here. Those of you who live in a community like Berkeley a liberal university town where you are not faced with the race problem every day are living in New York as I do where you almost never run into it any more. You

are inclined to forget what it's like if you live alone in a town like Birmingham are used in Texas are or almost any other town you can name. In the south of course one of the peculiarities of the race problem is how it varies so much from one place to another. But on the other hand that's also one of the aggravations of it because if you're colored You never quite know what you can do. Where even in the Deep South. I have traveled a great deal by air in the last 10 or 15 years and there's there are two towns within 40 miles of each other Houston and Dallas I don't live there any further apart and unless it's changed in one of those towns you would arrive at the airport and you could get into the airport limousine are taxi and go on into the city. But the other town only a few minutes away by air come out of the airport. The

taxis will not carry colored people. Airport limousine will not carry colored people. You have to phone all the way in town for a negro taxi to get transportation. When I how can you know that if you don't live there you don't know it but there you are find yourself two hours later getting in town when you expected to be there sooner. Well take the problem in the north for example. Let's go way up north. It was the Tacoma Washington. When I got off the train up there one time I had to take a bus to go somewhere else not too far away to read my poems. And there was no restaurant in the station. So I want to cross the street and there was a sign up colored people colored patronage not desired I believe the sign said right in the window of the restaurant. So I went back into the station I asked a Redcap where negro travelers could eat and he said well you have to. We have to walk about four blocks down that way and then you go two

blocks that way and you come to a Japanese restaurant where we can eat. Well here I am an American citizen an American town. I have to find a Japanese restaurant to get something to eat and that's not in the south. And sometimes I think the problem of democracy really boils down to a hamburger and a cup of coffee because there's so many places in our country right now where if you're colored You can't even get a hamburger and a cup of coffee. Well just one of two other problems. In spite of the. Widespread problem in this part of the fact that although it's being partially solved here and there it's certainly not solved on a national scale yet. There are many hopeful signs and some really big achievements in race relations in the last 10 or 12 years and we all know what they are so I won't go over them. And so I feel really quite hopeful about our democracy and I feel that we certainly will in time but I wish it weren't such a long time. Work out

all the problems and in a point like this when I try to express my faith and optimism in the future. I too sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes. But I laugh and eat well and grow strong. Tomorrow I'll be at the table when company comes. Nobody will dare say to me eat in the kitchen them. Besides they'll see how beautiful I am and be ashamed. I too am America. In New York during the war and afterward when we had coming into our country through the port of New York. So many refugees from oppression in Europe. Refugees from him to resume fascism. Sometimes they gross citizens would be a little envious of these refugees because they could come into New York and within a few months have a very good job that

if you were colored and been living New York all your life you couldn't get they could go move down to Birmingham and become that naturalized and in a few years vote and ride anywhere they wanted to on the buses or cars negroes bar in Birmingham couldn't do it. Well I thought there was a kind of kinship between these refugees and our selves in terms of the oppression of each group of us had known and also in terms of our desire for the kind of freedom that America really represents. And so I wrote this point in a poem called refugee in America. And. It's from my book of poems fields of wonder which is I think my favorite book of poems of my eight books of poems. It's my only book of lyric poems and most of the poems are very tiny little point if you can see them in the center of a page and on very beautiful paper it's a kind of book and often it's really quite beautiful

books and this book with this beautiful paper came out during the war. So one of the critics too I guess thought all or all of my parts should be for poetry and Bluenose didn't like this book very well. You like much better other books of mine that he named in my blues and humorous poems. And this particular critic said What a shame to waste all that good paper on such little poems. Well this little fire ever happened to be among my own favorites and I would like to read you more than just one from this book I'd like to read you two or three of these lyrics I will read you the revenue in America. There are words like freedom Sweden wonderful to say on my heartstrings freedoms things all day every day. There are words like liberty that almost make me cry. If you had known what I knew you would know why. And another of the lyrics in this book is one called

heaven. Heaven is a place where happiness is everywhere. Animals and birds sing as does everything to each stone. How do you do. Stone says I'm all right. How are you. And I read you one called borderline. I used to wonder about living and dying. I think the difference lies between tears and crying. I used to wonder about here and there. I think the distance is nowhere. Well I think the distance between Americans of whatever racial background they might be is really nowhere and when we really get to know each other well as communities where we do know each other well and where we do go to school together and get along together prove they're really not very many problems if any.

This final point tries to say that we're all going to be Americans together tomorrow. In my own family there was a long tradition of fighting and struggling to achieve the ideals of liberty and freedom and democracy. My grandfather was part of the Underground Railroad. He was a negro who worked with the Quakers in Ohio and who helped to rescue slaves to get them across the lake into Canada. And he served time in prison for helping people get to freedom. My grand uncle his brother. Help to break down some of the barriers in Washington. As long ago as 60 or 70 years. Because when the girls even then tried to move into decent housing and build homes and communities where there were trees and grass

it seemed that many white people didn't want them to do so and it seemed that my grand uncle bought a house in a fairly decent Everwood not a fine one at all but there were trees and lawns and paved streets and the white people built various at either end of the street to keep him from driving into the roadway where there is a horse and carriage seen that he had a beautiful white horse that carried him. And so my uncle my grand uncle simply stopped at the hardware store and bought himself an I X and drove up in his white horse and carriage and stepped up in his tail coat he was a politician he wore tail coat and a high hat stepped out with his axe and broke the barriers down and they've never been there anymore. Well also however in our family all the time I heard about the white people who were also. For liberty and freedom and democracy and and to help the Negroes to achieve it. And how the

Quakers the white Quakers often sacrifice their lives they were sometimes set upon by the slave hunters in the patter rollers they call them in those days and beaten and killed because they were suspected of helping slaves become free and we all know how many thousands of whites died in the Civil War to help bring about freedom. And then we know how in our own time of white Americans some of them at the risk of their own personal careers have helped to fight for the things that really mean democracy to all of us. And so my feeling is that in our country there are so many people who really want to make America what it's supposed to be that there's no way really of of our not achieving that objective. For all of us soon I hope so but I have lived off a long time myself and it hasn't happened yet. At any rate this point is

called tomorrow. It goes like this. We have tomorrow bright before us like a flame yesterday. A night gone thing a name and today for all the arch above the road we came. We march Americans together we march on.