Odd Fellows Building and Auditorium
The Independent was the main African-American newspaper published in
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. 1st. 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 22nd, 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.
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!
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