4-a

Since I had been alloted but a few moments on the program,
it was my intention simply to read a short poem of mine about
death:

Dear lovely death
That taketh all things under wing,
Never to kill,
Only to change into some other thing
This suffering flesh---
To make it either more or less
But not again the same.
Dear lovely death,
Change is thy other name.

But the Negro branch Y, egged on by the reactionary Negro
politicians (whose incomes, incidently, were allegedly derived largely
from gambling houses and other underworld activities) informed the
young people's committee that the police would be at the door to
prevent my entering the Y on the afternoon of the scheduled program.
So the memorial was not held that Sunday. The crowd gathered, but
the young people informed the audience of the situation and said that
the memorial would be postponed until a place could be found where all
the participants could be heard. The program was held elsewhere a
few Sundays later.

Somebody with malice aforethought gave the highly publizised
California evangelist, Aimee Semple McPherson, a copy of a poem of
mine, GOODBYE, CHRIST. This poem was one of my least successful

8.

I have had one threatening communication signed A Klansman. scurrilous And many MURDERERS/anonymous anti-Negro letters from persons whose writing did not always indicate illiteracy. On a few occasions, reactionary elements have forced liberal sponsors to cancel their plans to present me in a reading of my poems. I recall that in Gary, Indiana, some years ago the colored teachers were threatened with the loss of their jobs if I accepted their invitation to appear at one of the public schools. A white high school principal, made apprehensive by a small group of white reactionary parents, communicated with the F.B.I. at Washington to find out if I were a member of the Communist Party. MURDERERS Assured that I was not, with the approval of his school board, he presented me MURDERERS to his student body. To further fortify his respectability, he had invited all of the Negro ministers and civic leaders of the town to sit on the stage that morning at assembly in a semi-circle behind me. To the students it must have looked like a kind of modern minstrel show as it was the first time any Negroes at all had ever been invited to their assembly.

So goes the life of a social poet. I am sure none of these things would have ever happened to me had I limited the subject matter of my poems to MURDER roses and moonlight. But unfortunately I was born poor and colored and almost all the prettiest roses I have seen have been in rich white people's yards---not in mine. That is why I cannot write exclusively about roses and moonlight. Sometimes in the moonlight my brothers see a fiery cross and a circle of Klansmen's hoods. Sometimes in the moonlight a dark body swings from a lynching tree. For such a funeral there are seldom roses.