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Patriotism

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Poems celebrating -- or interrogating -- American patriotism from an African American point of view.

One of the most memorable examples of this theme in African American Poetry might be Frances E.W. Harper's "God Bless Our Native Land," which contains the following stanzas: 

God bless our native land,
Land of the newly free,
Oh may she ever stand
For truth and liberty.

God bless our native land,
Where sleep our kindred dead,
Let peace at thy command
Above their graves be shed.

Here, the phrase "Land of the newly free" stands out -- as a sharply expressed rejoinder to conventional patriotic ballads like Katherine Lee Bates' "America the Beautiful" (which was published in 1895 -- the same year as Harper's poem). 

Contents of this tag:

  1. Chapter 1b: Revisiting American History via Poetry, 1890-1899
  2. Frances E.W. Harper, "Eliza Harris" (1853/1854)
  3. Paul Laurence Dunbar, "The Colored Soldiers" (1895)
  4. Claude McKay, "America" (1921)
  5. "Afro-American" by Charles Frederick White (1900)
  6. Olivia Ward Bush Banks, "Crispus Attucks" (1899)
  7. Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Black Samson of Brandywine"
  8. T. Grant Gilmore, "The Twenty-Fifth Infantry" (1907)
  9. Joseph G. Bryant, "The Tenth Cavalry, U.S.A." (1907)
  10. Frances E.W. Harper, "God Bless Our Native Land" (1895)
  11. Katherine D. Tillman, "The Black Boys in Blue" (1902)
  12. Eugene Gordon, "The Pacifist" (1930)
  13. George Compton, "The Black Man" (1909)
  14. Aubrey Bowser, "The Brown and the Blue" (1909)