Woodson Anti Lynching Poems In The 1930s

In 1930, Walter White became NAACP executive
secretary and developed a close working relationship
with the Interracial Commission which led him to take
up the drive for federal [anti-lynching] legislation
once again. Walter White had forged his career in the
anti-lynching struggle. In 1933, when lynching once
more soared to a record high after dipping to a low of
10 the year before, he determined to channel the
NAACP’s piecemeal efforts into a concerted federal
lobbying campaign and test the New Deal’s commitment
to black civil rights. (“Anti- Lynching Efforts”)

Of necessity, the African-Americans poets writing in
the 1930s took up the theme of racial lynching. The
discourse of the poetic embodiment of lynching in
America had been established by E.L. Masters in Spoon
River Anthology, which climaxes its derision of
American culture in the 1920 by the presentation of a
failed lynching, although the would-be victim was not
a black man. The Spoon River Anthology
concludes with the incomplete text of the late Mr.
Jonathan Swift Somers’s “Spooniad,” which breaks off
as the mob is forming:

Just then, four lusty men
Bore the town marshal, on whose iron face
The purple pall of death already lay,
To Trainor's drug store, shot by Jack McGuire.
And cries went up of “Lynch him!” and the sound
Of running feet from every side was heard
Bent on the
		(Masters 133)				

Masters’s volume was highly influential and many black
poets absorbed various components of that pioneering
modernist work—its free verse, its use of the
confessional epitaph, its cynicism, and at times its
highly tabooed depiction of the practice of lynching.

       The
anti-lynching discourse in black poetry takes its
definitive origin with Claude McKay’s lapidary sonnet
“The Lynching.” In Joshua Eckhardt’s reading of the
poem, “These generations of lynchers would seem to
have defeated both the African and the religious
forces brought against them…” (MAP), and Nilay
Gandhi concurs, stating that “The Lynching” speaks to
the cultural cancellation of the African-American race
in the 1920s” (MAP).

---

from: The Book of
American Negro Poetry

by James Weldon Johnson, which is online at
archive.org

We can extract from these readings the motifs that
comprise this discourse: namely, (1) “the association
between the lynch victim and Christ” (Eckhardt MAP),
(2) “the savagery of the white fiends” (Eckhardt MAP),
and (3) “the [white] children are born with evil
spirits… Racism is the greatest of all troubles, as
natural as the day; one so rooted in the culture that
the blacks cannot overcome it” (Gandhi). There is a
deep intertextuality between McKay’s sonnet and the
poems that followed it in the 1930s, even while the
later poets struggled to overcome the conceptual
problems (the divide between realistic and
metaphysical treatments of the lynched body / soul)
that they subsequently identified in McKay’s
“Lynching.” We see this tendency to revisit the
conventions of the anti-lynching discourse in one of
the initial responses to the lynching crisis, that is,
Langston Hughes’s poems in response to the Scottsboro
Boys legal lynching, a situation that originally
commenced with the events that took place on a rail
line in Alabama on March 24, 1931. Susan Duffy
describes Hughes’s interest in the Scottsboro
controversy in these terms:

      The
early 1930s, the depression years, were a period in
which Hughes needed to find financial as well as
artistic moorings. Thrown out of “Godmother” Mason’s
white bourgeois environment that had served as a safe,
even affluent, haven during the first two years of the
Great Depression, Hughes sought solace and redirection
in a trip to Cuba. The Scottsboro incident occurred
prior to Hughes’ departure. In the intervening months
before his return to the United States, the legal
defense for the Scottsboro defendants was supplied by
the American Communist Party, which raised the case to
national prominence in order to attract new members.
Scottsboro became a vehicle to advance leftist
political and labor issues. The Scottsboro case
allowed the International Labor Defense (ILD), the
legal branch of the American Communist Party, to
garner national favor with political liberals and
minority workers. Rampersad saw this as a direct
campaign to enact Stalin’s goals to increase “black
participation in the party” and to establish
“self-determination for Afro-Americans as a commitment
of the communist effort in the United States.”

Hughes conducted a poetry reading tour of the South,
Midwest, and West, covering seventeen states. While in
Alabama he went to Kilby Prison and read his poetry to
the Scottsboro Boys. During the beginning of his tour,
Hughes’s earliest poem on the Scottsboro Boys, “Christ
in Alabama,” appeared in 1931 in Contempo, an
avant-garde literary magazine published in North
Carolina. Michael Thurston’s discussion of the poem
emphasizes Hughes’s revision of the trope that William
J. Maxwell calls “the stock emblem of the crucified
lynch victim” (MAP).

In this powerful illustrated form, with its
mixture of Roman and italic lines cutting back and
forth across the space of American history, “Christ in
Alabama” remained largely unknown for decades, though
Hughes’s now rare 1932 pamphlet Scottsboro Limited
prints the poem with the same use of italics and thus
confirms Hughes’s original intentions. There, however,
it is accompanied by a Prentiss Taylor illustration
that images the nine Scottsboro boys. (Nelson MAP)

While Hughes successfully disseminated his poetry
volume, The Negro Mother, as he toured, even
giving away hundreds of broadsides once he found that
many of those who came to hear him could not afford to
buy them, the Scottsboro Limited collection was
not a factor commercially: “Scottsboro Limited
did not capitalize on the great innovation of the Golden
Stair Press: its invitation to audiences to participate
in and further the creation of a black audience for
black literature” (Davey 239-40).

       Moving away from
Langston Hughes’s heavily documented activities, we
see that there are many considerations that come into
play when we try to evaluate the cultural space
occupied by black poetry in the 1930s: when we turn to
the places where poetry appeared in the 1930s, we
enter upon a number of unexpected problems. The major
black figures in poetry, Hughes, Sterling Brown, and
Richard Wright all addressed themselves to the topic
of lynching, but differently, and these differences
have been exaggerated by literary history. Currently,
the best known poem on lynching from the 1930s is not
by Hughes but is the anthology-piece by Richard
Wright, “Between the World and Me” — next to McKay’s
sonnet perhaps the

---

---

Richard Wright, “Between the World and Me”,

Partisan Review, Volume 2, No. 8
July-August 1935, online at Boston University

http://www.bu.edu/partisanreview/books/PR1935V2N8/HTML/index.html#1

I am particularly struck by one instance of influence
that may be considered illustrative. Welborn
Victor Jenkins, who in the opinion of Sterling
Brown was one of the most important poets of the
period, has been effaced from literary history. Yet
one of the most outstanding of modern African-American
poets as we now construct the historical literary
narrative, was clearly influenced by him, suggesting
that much of what went on in the 1930s may now be said
to have gone on below the surface of literary history
as it has been constructed. Melvin
B. Tolson opens his highly regarded modernist
epic, Harlem Gallery (1965), with lines that
refer to lynching, and I have used those lines as one
of the epigraphs for this chapter: Tolson’s “the
faggot and the noose” in connection with the question
“’Black Boy, O Black Boy, / is the port worth
the cruise?’” (ln. xxx; emphasis added) compares
favorably with the way in which Jenkins brings
together lynching (“ the Noose and the Rack and
Faggot”) and sailing (“leaving port at a certain
hour”) in the passage below from Trumpet in the
New Moon (1935):

  
There was an eminent foreigner visited our Country
To observe and study our manners and customs.
Was told of certain Creeds and Laws and Restrictions
That held the two races in separate compartments.
Was told that the Noose and the Rack and Faggot
Are oftimes evoked to maintain these Restrictions.
The visitor listened in grave and respectful silence,
Then asked: “Whence so many octoroons and quadroons
        and mulattoes?”
Was told of a ship leaving port at a certain hour:
And that we were grieved he so soon must be going.
                                              (lns. 277-83)

Previously, there was no perception of an association
between Tolson and Jenkins. Strictly speaking, Jenkins
was not a journal poet, for his work was self-published,
and he was not published in the journals. I am
presenting the Jenkins / Tolson association simply as an
indication that fundamental components of the literary
narrative of black poetry in the 1930s remain to be
ascertained and evaluated.

       Another topic
that must be considered relates to the race of the
journal poets. If we are attempting to recover some of
the poets and their contributions, we must also take
into consideration that in many cases there is not
enough information to establish identities for these
poets. A particularly interesting case is the poet
Kathleen Sutton, who published three poems in Opportunity:
“Outcast” in 1936 and “Backwash” and “Dirge for a
Saturday Night” in 1937. This is unremarkable except
that “Dirge” contains a familiar line in the second
stanza of a provocative and suggestive poem: “Strange
fruit hanging from the live oak limb, / Whiskey down
the gullet, cord around the throat.” The line is
nearly identical to the controlling trope in the most
famous poem in the anti-lynching campaign of the
1930s, “Bitter Fruit” (1937) by Lewis Allan (Abel
Meeropol), the poem made famous in its interpretation
by Billie Holiday as the jazz song, “Strange Fruit”:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
                              (Meeropol; emphasis added)	

At this point, I realized that I had privileged the
Meeropol text over the poem by Sutton even though it
is my contention that Meeropol’s poem was preceded by
Sutton’s, my unconscious assumption being that
Meeropol’s was the better poem. Nested within this
interlocking consideration is my original point, that
as far as I have been able to determine, Kathleen
Sutton is a white woman. The presumption is nearly
unavoidable that her poems in Opportunity,
with their voice, topics, and subject position situate
the writer as a black woman. The same may be said for
other journal writers, particularly Leonard Twynham
who resembles Sutton in his attention to racial
concerns: such research as I have been able to carry
out suggests that he was not black. The inquiry into
the racial identities of the journal poets of the
1930s seems to be tended in the direction that caused
Gloria Hull to assemble a list of questions about
Hughes and Marxism; the pertinent question raised by
Hull is the first:

1. How do Hughes’ identifiably Marxist poems
compare with/differ from his non-Marxist ones? Which
are better? Why? According to what/whose standards?
Answering these questions would require textual
analysis and could also include some discussions of
Hughes’ literary lineage and of the
personal/historio-cultural reasons why he chose the
particular forms he did. One would also keep in mind
that Hughes’ 1930’s poems are usually deemed inferior
and either explicitly or implicitly speak to this
judgment. (Duffy 201)

The assumption has often been made that Meerpol (or his
Lewis Allan persona) was black: for that matter,
Meeropol may well have assumed that Kathleen Sutton was
black, and it is likely that he did so. Had Kathleen
Sutton not been living in Alabama and had she had access
to Billie Holiday, might it have been “Dirge for
Saturday Night” that became the song that electrified
Holliday’s audiences, alerting them to the horrors of
southern life?

Dirge for a Saturday Night 

	By KATHLEEN SUTTON

BLACK, brother black, hear the death bells toll 
Far across the ocean where your sires were bred; 
Pray on your knees for the Lord to bless your soul, 
Shiver in your cabin, tremble in your bed! 
Black, brother black, sing a Methodist hymn 
Learn from a preacher in a dark frock coat. 
(Strange fruit hanging from the live oak limb, 
Whiskey down the gullet, cord around the throat.) 
Black, brother black, stamp your feet and shout! 
Or run like a rabbit down the alley way 
While the white man’s guns put a race to rout, 
And the white man’s God has nothing to say. 

The answer is no. Sutton’s “Dirge for a Saturday Night,”
strictly speaking, is not a poem about lynching; instead
it is a list of the manifold travails that afflict a universalized
black man. The black man is addressed three times by the
speaker as “black, brother black,” a locution that is
troublingly abstract, unnatural, and inauthentic. The
poem places the collective black subject under its
panoptic, omniscient gaze: the speaker is allowed such a
questionable position, presumably, because the political
opinion that is expressed in the poem is sympathetic to
the black man: if the poem is understood correctly, it
may be taken as an advocacy for black agency, an end to
the hiding, praying, and fleeing that constitute the
black man’s strategies for survival, at least as the
speaker of the poem tells it. The key to the poem is the
repetition of “black, brother black” in the first line
of each stanza, a device that has the effect of
emphasizing the speaker’s intimacy with the black
brother, even as what is being said separates the
speaker from the addressee. The first two lines allude
to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, thereby conflating
the condition of all black men into the helplessness of
the black brother who seeks only to avoid the realities
of his own oppression: that the Ethiopians attempted to
repel the Italian invaders is not admitted into the
poem’s scheme. The construction of the poem is nearly
symmetrical, with the first two lines of each stanza
depicting a condition, and the third and fourth showing
the effect brought about by the black man’s weakness:
this symmetry is most pronounced in the second stanza,
where the topic of lynching is addressed, and the
parentheses not only replicate the “cord around the
throat,” but the division of the stanza into two lines
about religion and two lines about lynching suggests
that the because of his embrace of religion, the black
brother colludes in his own lynching.

       Unavoidably,
then, we see that the speaker blames the black man for
his oppressed condition. Sutton is subtle in her
treatment of this challenging theme, and the
conclusion that the black brother must in the
end abandon his futile religion and directly strike
against his oppressor is left unstated. We may also
consider the possibility that Sutton’s rejection of
religion is paired with lynching because of her
intertextual confrontation of the specific trope of
the lynch victim as the fruit of a tree in Countee
Cullen’s poem “The Black Christ,” where the
protagonist, beaten, as Jesus was before him, is
dragged out and hanged on a “virgin tree / awaiting
its fecundity” (Smylie 8): fecundity means “fruitful”
so that Cullen is the possible originator the lynchee-fruit
trope, with the divergence of the virgin-strange
modifiers of the tree to take note of as markers of
the break between the discourse of Cullen’s existential
Christ-mysticism (Smylie 168, 171) and Sutton’s
horror (in the mode of such pulp publications
of the 1930s as Strange Tales). The resolution
of Sutton’s poem — “And the white man’s God has
nothing to say.” (ln. 12) — echoes W.E.B. DuBois’s “A
Litany of Atlanta,” written after an outbreak of
violence against blacks in 1906, in which DuBois cried
out to the “blind” God, the “silent” God, the “deaf”
God (Smylie 163).

       When Sutton
collected her poems into This Is the Season
(1947), she omitted “Dirge” and “Outcast” and included
“Backwash.” She included Opportunity in the
impressive list of periodicals where her work had
appeared, so there was no attempt to efface her
association with a black periodical, yet there is
nothing in the volume that betrays an interest in
racial issues, and where the poems are political and
social, the concerns are without racial emphasis.
However, when “Outcast” was published in Opportunity
in 1936, the effect achieved by the contextualization
of the poem on a page that discussed the need for
Negro youth to pursue careers in dentistry is far
different than that of the poem as it appears in This
Is the Season. The poem’s lines “Yet missing the
approval of his kind, / He reeled, to fall once more
into despair” (lns. 7-8) resonate tellingly against
John J. Mullowney’s plea: “…eighty per cent of the
equipment for the training of dental students at
Meharry stands idle because Negro youth have been
unwilling to undergo the four years of training
required for entering the dental profession. The need
is terrific. The opportunity unlimited. The challenge
cannot be shirked” (374).

In “The Materiality of the Text” Sean Cubitt states
that

“Texts draw their standing as
authentic or corrupt from their spatial and temporal
relations, their geographical and historical
distance from a mythic point of origin, whether that
origin be human or divine. Places, times and texts
are, in this sense, functions of distribution. The
meeting of all three in a specific and concrete
occasion we call reading…. As the text is
circumscribed by its materialisation in books, so
reading is circumscribed by the times and places
which, socially and culturally, are appropriated for
reading.”

Thus the semiology of the page in The Crisis
plays a determining role in how the poem may be read and
who may be presumed to have written the text. The
conjunction of Sutton’s poem, “Outcast” and the article
on dentistry installs the poem within the discourse of
the journal’s presentation of “Negro life,” with a
specific address to the problem of the inclusiveness of
Negro youth within useful fields of endeavor: “Outcast”
becomes a comment on the training of dentists and the
Negro who does not avail him/herself of the
opportunities is transcribed into the poem’s outcast
(and Sutton is transcriptively black). Similarly, our
reading of poems conjoined to texts concerned with the
anti-lynching theme take on the aura of that concern, so
that poems become infused with an anti-lynching
discourse as a result of their placement on the page.
Viewed in terms of the semiology of the pages on which
they appear, texts may be understood very differently
than when they are decontextualized. Emily B. Garrett’s
sequence of two sonnets lose their escapist
configuration when they are accessed on page 47 of The
Crisis for February 1936. The top third of the
page presents a statistical chart showing eleven states
where “Negroes are disenfranchised wholly or in part.”
Occupying the two columns parallel to Garrett’s poem is
a news story titled, “Joint Defense Committee for
Scottsboro Youths.” Garrett’s “Sequence” is as long as
the Scottsboro story, but the size and weight of the
Scottsboro headline commands attention and dominates the
center of the page, so the poem seems an extension of
the news story: the romantic cast of the first sonnet
resolves into a realistic appraisal — the
“sore-depressing rented room” (ln. 12) that the poet
inhabits and the figurative “unyielding bars of Life’s
bleak cage” (ln. 2) allude to the incarcerated
Scottsboro victims. The hopefulness of the second poem
where “the day requites / Me with a myriad enchanting
things” is a comment of the salvation of the prisoners.

       In another
example, Eugene Redmond lists J. Harvey L. Baxter as a
poet of “romantic escapes” (Drumvoices 223),
yet when we encounter an advertisement for Baxter’s
volume in The Crisis for January 1935, it is
printed on a page with a story on the Costigan-Wagner
anti-lynching bill, an ironic protest poem titled
“Lyncher’s Rally Song”, and an advertisement for
colored boudoir dolls, and the title of Baxter’s book
appears yet again as it is listed with nine other
books received for review. What we realize is that
(despite its avowedly social realist point of
origin) the romantic escapist determination derives
from a non-material and idealistic understanding of
textuality that does not take into account the
intertextual materiality of the page in which the
text operates. Baxter’s advertisement for That
Which Concerneth Me: Sonnets and Other Poems
urges above the title that the reader “select this
book for your library,” thereby constructing a
prospective reader for the poems over and above what
the ten sections of the page’s complex typography
present to the reader — a mélange of politics, sports,
commodities, and literature. Baxter’s volume is made
contingent with a progressive dynamism that has little
to do with an interest in escape, a page on which even
the dolls seem a positive affirmation of black social
identity. Baxter’s title, despite its Biblical-archaic
rhetoric (“The Lord will perfect that which concerneth
me,” Psalm 138.8) indicates the poet’s involvement
with a complex and perilous social reality.

       The first
breakthrough in the discourse of anti-lynching in the
poems written in the 1930s was for the poets to allow
the voices of the victims themselves to be heard. This
solved a number of problems — the silence of the
victim, the unreality of the speaking trees, and the
aesthetic (and political) ineffectiveness of the
portrayal of mob violence — that had come about
because of adherence to the restricted subject
positions derived from imitations of the pioneering
ballads and sonnets, even though poems that followed
in the 1930s did not utilize the forms of the previous
poems, but were either loosely rhymed or used free
verse. Williamson achieves considerably more realism
in “From the Delta’s Unmarked Graves” (1934), by
imitating the epitaphs of Masters’s Spoon River
Anthology in order to allow the voices of the
lynched to tell their individual stories. Marcus
Christian’s “Spring in the South” is a remarkable
poem, for it does not treat lynching directly, but the
urgency of the voice betrays the subject’s terror at
being in the South: once the imagery has done its
work, it is apparent that the poem is deeply invested
in lynching, for the poem recapitulates the entire
ritual of lynching through its vocabulary and imagery:
the “resurrection” in the first line suggests the
spiritual ascent of McKay’s sonnet, “The Lynching.”
Pain grips the subject’s body in line five. Most
telling, however, is the suggestion of burning in
“warm” (ln. 2), “flames leap up” (ln .3), “fire” (ln.
7), “kindling” (ln. 8) and the wordplay in which
“kindlier” (ln.12) echoes kindle. We also are
confronted with the familiar motif of the victim’s
inarticulacy — “Song inarticulate damns up the mouth”
(ln. 6).

       A subsequent
innovation in the anti-lynching discourse was to allow
the lynchers to speak directly to the reader. One
particularly noteworthy instance of the development of
this approach is an anecdote in Jenkins’s long poem, Trumpet.
The Southerners are presented through indirect
discourse, and like Sterling Brown’s “Let Us Suppose”
(1935) the sophisticated use of an ironic and
magisterial voice entertains the reader at the expense
of producing an emotional reaction.

There was an eminent foreigner visited our Country
To observe and study our manners and customs.
Was told of certain Creeds and Laws and Restrictions
That held the two races in separate compartments.
Was told that the Noose and the Rack and Faggot
Are oftimes evoked to maintain these Restrictions.
The visitor listened in grave and respectful silence,
Then asked: “Whence so many octoroons and quadroons
       and mulattoes?”
Was told of a ship leaving port at a certain hour:
And that we were grieved he so soon must be going.
                                           (Trumpet  lns. 272 -284)

       The culmination
of the anti-lynching discourse in the black poetry of
the 1930s came about when it became possible for a new
voice to be heard. The persuasive possibilities of
this voice were made apparent in poems that presented
African-American children as foils to the demonic
children that so tellingly make an entrance in McKay’s
sonnet, “The Lynching” — “And little lads, lynchers
that were to be, / Danced round the dreadful thing in
fiendish glee.” (lns. 13-14), although the white child
that is party to a lynching enters the discourse much
earlier in Dunbar’s “The Haunted Oak”: Oh, the judge,
he wore a mask of black, /And the doctor one of white,
/And the minister, with his oldest son, /Was curiously
bedight. (lns. 37-40). The treatment of the black
child in connection with lynching was fairly common
among black poets of the 1930s, perhaps because it
seemed a natural response to the theme of the
dehumanizing initiation of the white child into the
practice of lynching: thus if the white child was to
be shown as a dehumanized brute or a demon, the black
child could be shown with positive characteristics.

       The
African-American poetry of the 1930s derived this
approach to the black child from a discourse that had
previously positioned the black child in the
ant-lynching discourse beginning decades earlier.
Katherine Capshaw Smith’s research on children’s
literature in the Harlem Renaissance shows that
“ethnic children’s literature becomes a particularly
intense site of ideological and political contest, for
various groups of adults struggle over which versions
of ethnic identity will become institutionalized in
school, home, and library settings…” (Smith
“Introduction”). Smith demonstrates that in the first
two decades of the twentieth century children’s
literature formulated at the behest of W.E.B. Du Bois
and the NAACP children’s literature “cross-writing”
blurred the line between the child and the adult,
connecting the child to adult political issues, such
as lynching. For Du Bois, the child was the only real
source from which social progress could spring. Smith
also shows that in the anti-lynching discourse of the
1920s the child was often portrayed as the direct or
indirect victim of racial violence, and we have seen
that that depiction of the black child as a victim of
racial violence continued in the poetry of the 1930s.
The handling of this motif in Gwendolyn Brook’s poem,
“Southern Lynching” (Crisis 1937) is
unexceptional except for the inclusion of the
adjective “little” in the poem’s final line: “Brown
little baby, go to bed.”

Brooks’s “little” resounds intertextually against
McKay’s “…little lads, lynchers that were to be” (ln.
13), so that her entire poem is redirected into an
affirmation of black humanity. The final innovation in
the anti-lynching discourse of the poetry written in
the 1930s was to position the black child as a
militant spokesperson and activist. The culmination of
the poetic anti-lynching discourse that centers on the
motif of the black child — which is also the
culmination of the poetic anti-lynching discourse
— was a poem by Esther Popel, “Flag Salute,” a text
that was published in The Crisis in 1934,
1936, 1938, and 1940.

---

Left: from The
Crisis, May 1936, p.137, Right: The
Crisis Nov 1940

many issues of The
Crisis are available online via google
books.

Popel, a Washington, D.C. schoolteacher, was a minor
Harlem Renaissance figure, whose poetry was dismissed
in the 1930s by Alain Locke as belonging to the school
of romantic escape (Redmond xxx). Though Popel did
publish “romantic” poems in journals during the 1930s,
she was one of the many black journal poets writing in
the 1930s who at times wrote poems of social protest.
Her poem, “Flag Salute,” is noteworthy for the method
of its composition as well as for its unique
reception:

       The
structure of Popel’s poem is deceptively simple,
consisting of (1) a parenthetical note (2) the
flag salute, italicized and enclosed in quotation
marks, and (3) an account of a lynching. The note
sets the scene by describing the opening exercises
for a public school classroom. While the note does
specify that the classroom is in a Negro school,
no geographic information is disclosed. The note
relates what took place in the classroom, though
there is no mention of a teacher, and the students
are shown conducting the exercise, the reading of
a news story, the discussion, and the subsequent
flag salute without any adult supervision.

       The text of
the flag salute is dispersed throughout the poem,
such that its first line begins the poem and its
last line ends it. The text of the flag salute
interrupts the description of the lynching at four
other points within the poem, although since the
poem is without stanza divisions, the text seems
all of a piece.

       The account
of the lynching is particularly ambiguous. The
note states that “a pupil gave as his news topic
during the opening exercises of the morning, a
report of the Princess Anne lynching of Oct. 18,
1933,” so that we might assume that the account in
the body of the poem is that report, but a close
reading of the text casts doubt on the origin of
the “report” as it is given in the poem. The
report is divided into five sections, and each
section ends with an exclamation point, a fact
which immediately rules out the report as falling
within the discourse of journalism. There are
additional violations of journalistic style —
inverted grammar, rhetorical questions, figurative
language, and speculation. The speaker offers a
detailed account of the familiar ritualistic
lynching attended by a mass audience. We are not
able, however, to account for the outraged voice
of the speaker. Thus the poem operates by
situating the poem at the intersection of three objective
texts, which form one text with the characteristic
of meta-objectivity.

       The function
of such an achieved meta-objectivity is
obvious, for it endows the poem with an
unassailable moral judgment that condemns the
deeply engrained American practice of unequally
distributing justice. In other words, the poem
operates to illustrate what Gunnar Myrdal later
defined as the American dilemma, isolating for
examination an injustice that flies in the face of
America’s founding principles: the flag salute
itself, then, comments negatively on the newspaper
report of the lynching. That this subversion is
achieved by Negro students through the
manipulation of authoritative texts is the
ultimate protest of racial injustice. In reality,
as we have seen, the “report” is less than
objective, and were it not so, the poem would be
ineffective, for it is the simulation of
objectivity that allows the poem at once to be
meta-objective, while maintaining the subject
position of an outraged witness whose reaction is
personal, emotional, and terrorized. In other
words the poem is provided a voice with whom the
reader can identify, while listening to the voice
as though it is merely reciting a factual account.
Popel’s poem is ultimately ironic, as are so many
of the poems in this discourse, but here the irony
is multiply situational, another feature which
does not overly disturb the appearance of the
poem’s meta-objectivity: the children do not
dissent from saluting the flag, while at the same
time the speaker of the account implies that the
poem is an exercise in dissent. Distanced by the meta-objective
intertextuality of the flag salute and the
“report,” the students do not seem to identify
with the victim, though we notice that their
“brief discussion of the facts of the case” is not
included in the poem. Finally, then, the poem is
suspended on this aporia: the children are an
unknown and unknowable quantity. The poem
does not give us what it pretends to give, and it
leaves us with the mystery of the future.

       Popel’s
“Flag Salute” effectively framed a viable poetic
response to lynchings. At the same time, perhaps
unavoidably, the poem was effective enough to stir
up forces of opposition. The original publication
in 1934 came in an issue dedicated to the theme of
higher education, and it promised news of the 1934
college graduates. The cover featured an
illustration in the social realist style that
portrayed two oversized figures, one in chains
with his arms around proportional figures — a
laborer, a farmer, and a scrubwoman —; the second
figure was shown soaring aloft with a diploma and
a mortarboard, two watching figures rejoiced.
Below the picture was a headline saying “Cowards
from the Colleges” by Langston Hughes. The complex
page on which Popel’s poem was printed in the
right-hand column also showed a picture of a crowd
across the entire bottom — NAACP in Oklahoma City,
Okla., June 27 — July 1, 1934. The left-hand
column was taken up with the end of a news story
about recent NAACP events and below that
“Persistent Quest,” a sonnet by C. Faye Bennett.
When the poem reappeared in May of 1936, it ran
beneath a heading that proclaimed “School
Officials Dislike This.” The editor’s note that
followed stated that the poem was one of the items
judged “objectionable” by a committee which
reported to the Board of Education, and
recommended that The Crisis not be
approved for use in the schools of the District of
Columbia. The poem was printed below, divided into
two columns. The remainder of the page was
occupied by the completion of a story that began
on the previous page, “’Objectionable Matter’ in The
Crisis.” Apparently, the controversy
continued, for the May 1938 issue carried as one
of its headlines, “The Crisis ‘Not
Approved,’ A Ruling by the Board of Education in
Washington, D.C.” The end of the news story poses
the question “…of how a magazine could be
published in the United States of America in the
interest of Negroes and not be critical of the
white race.

---

From The
Crisis, May 1936, pages 136-138.
The full
article and issue are accessible through
google books.

The poem ran again in November of 1940, this
time on the cover of the issue: the appearance of
the poem on the cover, running within a single
line border and beneath the masthead with its
title in print nearly as large as the magazine’s
name is graphically arresting. The cover of the
issue immediately preceding the number featuring
Popel’s poem had showed black men manning an
anti-aircraft cannon, so the cover bearing a poem
beneath the masthead for The Crisis is at
once restrained and ominous. This time, Popel’s
note was different:

(Note: In these days when armies are marching
and there is much talk of loyalty and democracy
on all fronts in America, it is being said that
the strongest defense of democracy lies in the
unity of all groups in the nation and a
conviction that each has a stake in a democratic
government. When it was announced in Washington
on October 9, almost simultaneously, that the
federal anti-lynching bill had been killed in
the Senate and that Negro Americans would be
segregated and discriminated against in the U.
S. armed forces, THE CRISIS received
several requests to reprint this poem. It was
written after a lynching which occurred in
Princess Anne, Maryland, October 18, 1933.)

The note has been made politically and socially
relevant to the threat of war and the failure of
the government to address the continuing fact of
racial violence at the expense of poetic meaning,
for the crucial description of the scene within
the school has been omitted. Given the urgency of
the events described in the new note, it is
possible to understand what drove the editors of The
Crisis to their insensitivity to the text,
but it must be pointed out that as it appeared in
1940, despite the grand appearance that the poem
made on the cover, it made very little sense. The
fact that Esther Popel’s disturbing poem, “Flag
Salute,” was used to tie the continuation of
racial terrorism to the promise that the
African-American would be expected to play a role
in an imminent world war is a fitting end to this
discussion of the anti-lynching poetry of the
1930s. Popel’s poem is unique in the way that it
presents a dissenting voice, for much of what was
written in this discourse is merely protest poetry
that does not rise above obligatory conceptions.
We see, from the editor’s note in the 1940
version, that “Flag Salute” was reprinted a fourth
time because of urgings from the readership, a
tangible indication that poetry in this vein was
an important component of the black culture of the
decade. For many people it gave expression to
crucial insights, feelings, and ideas which it
might otherwise have been impossible to remedy
from trauma, incoherence, and inarticulacy.

       We may say
that the determining social condition on black
subjectivity in the 1930s is what we may call the
white nullification of the black self (and
perhaps we might even frame the proposition so
that it addresses white self-fashioning through
this type of extinction of the black self-image,
so that we do not lose sight of the
intersubjective dynamic inherent in this process).
In response to this complex cultural attack on the
black self, black Americans created a countertext
in which they attempted the resubjectivation of
the black self. This countertext took many forms
(and to a large extent was in a sense unconscious)
— and we may even propose that the anti-racist,
anti-lynching textuality of the 1930s consisted of
a subjectivizing counter-text, of which formal
poetry constituted but one aspect. This view of
the reading of poetry is encouraged by the
psychologist K.R. Gergen who states that “Persons
of letters — including poets, historians,
journalists, essayists, philosophers, novelists
and the like — are of special interest for the
study of the diachronic development of
self-understanding. It is such groups in
particular that have most effectively pushed
forward the dialogue of self-construction”
(emphasis added; 76). Similarly, Erik Erikson
suggests the specificity of the role of
African-American literature in the formation of
African-American self-understanding and self-
construction: “In a haunting way they [Du Bois,
Baldwin, Ellison] defend a latently existing but
in some ways voiceless identity against the
stereotypes which hide it. They are involved in a
battle to reconquer for their people, but first of
all (as writers must) for themselves … a
‘surrendered identity.’ … what is latent can
become a living actuality, and thus a bridge from
past to future” (Identity 297). Erikson’s
insistence on the latency of African-American
identity is suggestive, since we have seen the
process of self-formation in successive
anti-lynching poems. We might posit the
particularly central role of poets in this
activity of black self-construction during the
Depression, given the paucity of African-American
historians, philosophers, and novelists to work
along these lines: with Gergen’s insight in mind,
we see that we may not take for granted the work
of black poets whose works were routinely situated
adjacent to journalism and essays in such journals
as The Crisis and Opportunity.

---

WORKS
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http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/reflector/historicalb.html 9 1
2006

Baxter, J. Harvey L. That Which Concerneth
Me: Sonnets and Other Poems. Roanoke, VA:
Magic City Press, 1934.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “Southern Lynching.” Crisis
June, 1937:189.

Brown, Sterling A. Collected Poems. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1996.

Christian, Marcus B. “Martyrs of the Rope
Brigade.” Opportunity May, 1934: 135.

Cubitt, Sean. “The Materiality of the Text.”
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http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita/materiality.html
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Davey, Elizabeth. “Building a Black Audience in
the 1930s: Langston Hughes, Poetry Readings, and
the Golden Stair Press.” Print Culture in a
Diverse America. Ed. James P. Danky and
Wayne A. Wiegand. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1998.

Eckhardt, Joshua. “On ‘The Lynching’” Modern
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Erikson, E.H. Identity: Youth and Crisis.
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Gandhi, Nilay. “On ‘The Lynching’.” Nelson,
Cary. Anthology of Modern American Poetry.
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Gates, Henry Louis, et al. Ed. The Norton
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House, Homer.“Lyncher’s Rally Song” Crisis
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Sutton, Kathleen. This Is the Season.
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_____. “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An
Autobiographical Sketch.” American Stuff: An
Anthology of Prose and Verse by Members of the
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---

Jon Woodson is a Howard University Emeritus
Professor of English. His critical studies
include Oragean Modernism: A lost
literary movement, 1924-1953
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform,
2013), To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff,
Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance
(University Press of Mississippi, 1999), Anthems,
Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the
African-American Poetry of the 1930s
(Ohio State University Press, 2010), and A
Study of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: Going
Around Twice (Peter Lang
International Academic Publishers, 2001). He has
also written a comic novel, Endowed
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform,
2012). More can be found at Prof. Woodson’s Amazon.com
page. A related essay can be found at “Anthroparody:
Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘The Characteristics of
Negro Expression’ and the Real Characteristics
of Black Expression.”



His latest project is the editing of an
unprecedented historical novel on the
colonization of the Belgian Congo—Zairian author
Dicho Ilunga’s Dancing with Cannibals,
initially available as an Amazon ebook.

Prof. Woodson appears
also in FlashPøint
#14‘s Melvin B.
Tolson issue, namely: “Reading
Melvin B. Tolson’s Harlem Gallery: Alchemy,
Codes, and the Key to the Secret of Life”
and “Melvin
B. Tolson and Oragean Modernism: a few notes
on The Problem of Esoteric Writers in
American Literature.”

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