Siftings from Georgia - The Poet of the Atlanta Independent

Odd Fellows Building and Auditorium

The Independent was the main African-American newspaper published in Atlanta until 1928. Started in 1903 by the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, it managed to stay in business much longer than its hometown neighbor, the Voice of the Negro, which only ran from 1904-1906. The weirdly-named order originated in the late 18^th century in England, and received a charter in Baltimore in 1820. In 1843, Peter Ogden, a dark-skinned Englishman, submitted an application for a New York charter in the name of the free black community there. Amazingly, he received the charter and from there the order expanded to Philadelphia and even into slave states before the outbreak of the Civil War. The need for mutual support for banking and health services prompted many blacks to join fraternal societies.

Benjamin Davis

Benjamin Davis served as editor. Not meant as a literary journal, the paper chiefly served as a means for people to see their names and the names of their community members in a respectable publication. Frank Marshall Davis, the man who would become editor of the Atlanta Daily World in the 1930s, called it “little more than a personal sheet.” About a third of each issue is devoted to the Personal and Editorial sections, which seem largely interchangeable. They featured short snippets like the following:

Dr. and Mrs. H.D. Canady and Mrs. Neal Daniel were delightfully served with a luncheon at the home of Rev. and Mrs. C.G. Gray, on Foundry street, Sunday, Feb. 1^st. A pleasant evening was enjoyed.

The address and the full names are the core of the entries – by putting a description of your party in the paper, you were seen as respectable. After reading a few of these entries, one get the sense that everyone’s dinners are “delightful” and everyone always has “pleasant evenings.”

Poetry in the paper usually appears as eulogies – a daughter mourning her mother, a mother mourning her lost daughter. The verses are simple, traditional and dignified. Putting one’s sorrows in a poem was a way of honoring the dead and showing their importance to the rest of the community. Here’s an example:

Sleep on dear father,

And take thy rest,

We loved you well,

But God loved you best.

There was also the “Crusader’s Corner,” a weekly column which took submissions of light, sing-song poems by middle school children about cleaning up, doing their homework and not getting too dirty when playing outside. Poetry served as ornament both in the eulogies and the kids’ poems.

At the same time, however, you can see a growing emphasis on respectable art. On March 10, 1921, an article celebrates Charles Gilpin, the first black actor to play the lead in a Broadway play (Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones), as he attends the Drama League Dinner, which sounds a lot like the Tony Awards. There was a big debate as to whether he should be invited, and when he finally came, he received the biggest ovation of anyone in attendance. Gilpin is quoted as saying “Thank you… for calling me artist… The word ‘artist’ is something I always thought of as way off yonder, but not something I could ever attain.” That year, Gilpin won the Spingarn Medal, the most esteemed award in the African-American community, defined as the “highest achievement… in any field of elevated or honorable human endeavor.”

Beginning in the mid-twenties, Thomas Jefferson Flanigan began a regular poetry column entitled “Siftings from Georgia.” As the title suggests, the column was filled with nostalgic odes rooted in the concept of place, more specifically rural Georgian life. His photo appeared at the top of each column, so readers became familiar with him as an individual with a particular personality.

His most common series of poems within this column was called “Echoes from South Georgia.” Now we’ve moved from a state-wide zone to an even smaller region of focus. Although Flanigan moved to the city as a young man, he took most of his material from his childhood in the country. In response to a poem where Flanigan describes his elementary school and the plantation culture, a reader writes:

Am taking this moment to thank you for “The Ballad of Old Bluff Spring School” that appeared in yesterday’s Independent. You depicted rural life so vividly; also your description of the Bluff Spring School, which you attended, was minute in its scope. I can vouch for the rural customs and the description of Bluff Spring, first, because I attended the rural school for seven years, and secondly, I have visited Bluff Spring” (3/12/25)

The poetry is valued more because it is so geographically accurate. Flanigan is best when describing rural pastimes rather than striving for traditional odes to beauty and invocations of the Muse. He uses a soft dialect, and his main structuring element is the refrain, a repeated line which recalls the spirituals. Here he speaks about sowing the fields by harping on one aspect of the planting- the ‘furrow,’ a long, narrow trench made by the plow:

Chris’mus time is over and gone-

Heed the call of the furrow,

If you’d hear the dinner time horn

Heed the call o’ the furrow;

Your honey’s at the table an’ she takes her stan’

In the hard brown crust is the print o’ her han’

Where she spanked the corn pone in the bakin’ pan.

Heed the call o’ the furrow.

Boll weevil waitin’ where the brushes heap,

Heed the call o’ the furrow;

The fiddles stop playin’ and the fiddler’s asleep-

Heed the call o’ the furrow;

Ol’ mule whimpering like he’s rarin’ for work,

Wheel him aroun’ with a friendly jerk,

Tell ‘im “Let’s go back,” no time to shirk-

Heed the call o’ the furrow.

In the January 22^nd, 1925 issue, he acknowledges his formal similarities with the spirituals by printing the poem “Zion” and attempting to start a regular “Gospel Hymn Series” by calling it “Installment No. 1.” He explains, “At the solicitations of any divines it shall be my feeble effort to run one sacred number in the column per week.” While this series doesn’t continue beyond this issue, the rest of his poems to resemble the pace and structure of the spirituals that it might as well have. The paper featured a sermon in every issue, so Biblical topics and ways of speaking were common.

In April 23, 1925’s “A Song of that ‘Sweet Hour of Prayer’,” we return to Christianity:

“Sweet hour of prayer,” those glorious peals

Fired that fighting race of old,

And with the same fervor they send

Live currents through a famished soul.

“Tis joy to head those Sabbath bells

Break forth their chimes on morning’s air,-

Announcing to the waking town,

The approach of that “Sweet hour of prayer.”

I heard my mother, as a child,

In Sunday school, far, far away,

Pour from her heart that old sweet song

Made sweeter by each passing day;

My tender heard, then had not learned

The yoke of life’s long troubling acre,

Only in form. I knelt with her

In that long-time-sweet hour of prayer.

The beating years have stole from me

The sweetness that my life once knew.

The faces of those rural church folk

Ere now have faded from my view,

But there remaineth yet one joy

That from me time nor force can tear

In it a solace sweet I find-

That ever present “Hour of Prayer.”

It seems as if the words ‘faded’ and ‘passing’ are stock elements of all poems about the South. It seems impossible to overcome the weight of nostalgia for rural life, and at the same time, there are no rural poets - the poets have already left their rural communities, whether to go to a Southern city or to head North. It makes you think that these urban writers, including Thomas Jefferson Flanigan, only feel the need to reminisce about plantation life once they have distanced themselves from its struggles. Does poetry exist inside the rural community, or is there only poetry about the rural community written and read from afar? Flanigan gives us some hope when he describes poetry’s role in his upbringing: “My mother was a lover of poetry and we used to get in that far-off isolated rural community the Tri-Weekly Constitution, and I was brought up on Frank L. Stanton and James Whitcolb Riley” (1/29/25). So literature wasn’t entirely foreign to him as a rural kid. It’s interesting to note that both the poets he cites are white – while it’s great that poetry reaches him, the idea of African-American poetry being published and distributed in the rural communities is too much to ask.

Flanigan was not the most creative or lyrical poet, but he managed to maintain a weekly column for years in a paper that only had about five pages total. His Georgia sketches were the only examples of verse in the paper, and were on people’s minds and dinner tables as long as they renewed their subscription. As the sole poetic voice from the Atlanta Independent, it’s useful to see what aspects of life he chooses to depict, and what formal approaches he adopts.

Flanagan was also a folk-painter. This is Fishing by the Quarters

Just for fun, here’s a rare example of a poem written by someone else. This poem was embedded within a fierce editorial condemning the merger of Standard Life, a large black insurance company, and Southern Insurance, a white organization. The article was called “Destroying Institutions and Saving Men – Standard Life an Example,” and the author (an unnamed writer from the Birmingham Reporter) accuses the heads of Standard Life of swindling away the money earned by tens of thousands of employees hitting the streets and building up this black company, arguing that their incompetence and illicit dealings forced the company to surrender its integrity and merge with white business:

God give us men! A time like this demands

Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands;

Men whom the lust of office does not kill;

Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;

Men who possess opinions and a will;

Men who have honor – men who will not lie.

Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog

In public duty and in private thinking;

For while the rabble with their thumb-worn creeds

Their large professions and their little deeds

Mingle in selfish strife, lo! freedom weeps

Wrong rules the land, and waiting justice sleeps!