Word: blackly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Jean-Paul Sartre has said that Negro poetry is "the true revolutionary poetry" of the time, something that transcends race alone. Richard Wright, the father of the black novel, laid claim to "a right more immediately deep er than that of politics or race . . . .that is, a human right, the right of a man to think and feel honestly." In Chicago, a mural on a ghetto wall glowers and glows at passersby in pride and in challenge. Or, hear Owen Dodson...
Such work stands peer to Frost, Sandburg and other white American poets who are constantly recited in our schools. In fact, the black tenth of the nation has produced at least a dozen lyric voices of the most intense quality: Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, Fenton Johnson and Frank Home. Here, selected lines are ranged against the pictures, both as commentary and gloss...
...poems that accompany the pictures on the following pages are all by Negroes, and all but one are by Americans. Yet Africa too moves in the depths of each; tender and ghostly, pantherlike, a mother bereaved. For every black American, as Claude McKay's poem suggests, makes peace-or else fails to make peace-with ancestors whose names, whose very tribes, were long since lost to consciousness . Henri Rousseau's pitch-black Snake Charmer reigns at Paris' Jeu de Paume. She makes immense cold phallic serpents writhe into the moonlight, sleepily. One may identify with...
...black schoolgirl in Philip Evergood's painting There'll Be a Change in the Weather stands as straight as Caspar the King. She is wearing sneakers just like the other kids, so white, and a pretty school frock. But she is mocked. The children who should be her friends stick out their tongues. The beauty of the painting hurts. One al most expects the mothering earth to open and receive the girl, to save her from the hell of that schoolyard...
...name given to a thing is not the subject, it is only a convenient label. The subject is inexhaustible." Yet the label that Bellows gave to his 1909 masterpiece at Washington's National Gallery has weight. Both Members of This Club, he calls it, and there a black man and a white are trying to beat each other's brains out for money...