Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/182

This page has been validated.
160
NEGRO POETS AND THEIR POEMS

By way of indicating the idealistic aspirations of the colored people I gave at the end of Chapter I. J. Mord Allen’s Miss Jessie Redmon Fauset poem The Psalm of the Uplift. For the same purpose I will give here, at the end of this chapter, a poem of the very present day from one of the most accomplished young women of the Negro race. Besides its intrinsic merit as a poem it has the further recommendation for a place in this chapter that it celebrates a woman of the black race who was the very embodiment of its noblest qualities—illiterate slave though she was. It is a splendid testimonial to her people of this later day that Negro literature is filled with tributes to Sojourner Truth. She was indeed a wonderful woman, altogether worthy to be ranked with the noble heroines of biblical story. From a Negro historian I take the following restrained account of her:[1]

  1. A Short History of the American Negro. By Benjamin Brawley. The Macmillan Company.