Countee Cullen was one of the Harlem Renaissance's most celebrated literary lights, along with the more famous poet Langston Hughes and novelist Zora Neale Hurston. Born 118 years ago today, Cullen witnessed open racism growing up in America. In his 1925 poem "Incident," he writes about an encounter as a little boy while on a trip to segregated Baltimore:
"Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, 'Ni**er.'
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember."
Tomorrow and Tuesday mark the 100th anniversary of the vicious, senseless massacre of hundreds of African-Americans in Tulsa, OK, by thousands of armed white racists. The African-American community of Greenwood, known as the "Black Wall Street" for its business life and prosperity, was sacked and burned in the whites' riot. Cullen's poem, written just four years after Tulsa, is but one testiment -- by him as a child -- of the racism that African-Americans encounter, in small ways and large ways, in their daily lives, and that we must acknowledge and fight.
