Poems are the one form of written expression that almost always have an emotional impact on me. Poems can dredge up feelings felt long ago, like old photographs or music from my college days, or smells radiating from my mother’s kitchen when I was a child. The words of a well-written poem can make me feel in love again or make me feel rage, lust, loss, peace, hope, grief, and despair—everything it means to be a human being. Some poems, like a good old friend, also comfort and console, elate and elevate, embolden and encourage. These poems have always been my favorite.
Margaret Walker’s “For My People” is just such a poem. Its intense passion and repetition of the plight of African Americans makes it an especially good piece for oral presentation. That’s one of the reasons I chose the piece to recite for Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project, short video documentaries showcasing individual Americans, like me, reading the poems they love. Some of the videos, including my reading of Walker’s “For My People,” were also featured on PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and are now a permanent part of the Library of Congress’s archive of recorded poetry and literature.
Walker’s inspiring poem has always spoken directly to me, an African American woman living in the South, often tired by the daunting task of being Black in America. I’m a former appellate judge often “mistaken” for a domestic worker when I’m in a nice hotel or restaurant. I’m a sixty-four-year-old wife and mother who’s often asked about my natural hair, which some white people find “interesting.” I’m also a relatively wealthy woman frequently followed by salespeople in stores presumably to ensure I don’t steal the merchandise. I’m a scholar and a businesswoman often praised for being articulate and a credit to my race.
Like many African Americans, no matter how rich or poor, educated or uneducated, famous or known only to their friends and families, I’m tired from bearing the weight of seeing my people, day in and day out, minimized and marginalized, humiliated and hated, diminished and sometimes even destroyed. I’m tired of having to justify Black excellence vis-à-vis white approval, and of having to prove that I deserve to live as a full citizen of this country, socially, politically, and culturally—a nation built, in large part, on the backs of my people.
“For My People” speaks of this history of African American suffering. The first few stanzas recall the songs of an enslaved race—songs of sadness, of grief, of the rare times of joy, as well as the submission to whatever God has willed. In describing so fervidly the bitter truth of what it’s like to be Black in America, it affirms what I know and how I feel.
The ode is also a chronicle of the never-ending attempts by African Americans like me to be accepted into mainstream American life, in “schools and clubs and societies, associations and councils and committees and conventions,” only to be cheated out of the rights afforded to other Americans by the white ruling majority and the “facile force of state.” Yet the composition, thankfully, also celebrates a great people who have, against great odds, nevertheless survived and thrived and endured against many obstacles.
Langston Hughes’s pithy and powerful poem, “I look at the world,” like Walker’s “For My People,” has similarly spoken to me during my life, exposing the truth of my existence as a Black person in this country, while offering hope. Hughes wrote:
I look at the world
From awakening eyes in a black face—
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space
Assigned to me.
......................
I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that’s in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find.
Like Hughes’s poem, “For My People” concludes with a hopeful prayer in the form of the poem’s famous mantra. “Let a new earth rise,” the closing incantation implores. “Let another world be born.” The end of the ballad calls for a world born of a “bloody peace,” peopled by a courageous and freedom-loving new generation, a race of people—people of goodwill everywhere, who will someday “rise and take control.” It has always inspired me.
When I have found myself limping through life with the burden of race on my shoulders, Walker’s lament and prayer for African Americans has always given me great comfort and joy. I befriended the poem many years ago, and I still think of it often when I’m exhausted and otherwise need a shoulder upon which to lean.
Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, photographed by Foster & Associates, 2004
Leah Ward Sears is an American jurist and former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia. Sears was the first African-American female chief justice of a state supreme court in the US and was the first woman and youngest person to sit on Georgia’s Supreme Court.