Poetry and Racial Justice and Equality

Even though its founding documents profess an egalitarian vision of opportunity and equal treatment of its citizens, rights and liberties deemed inalienable, the United States has struggled to live up to its avowed values of fairness and equality and to extend the privileges of freedom that animated its foundational cause for self-determination and sovereignty after hard-won battles against a progressively tyrannical British monarchy.

Its unapologetic history of white supremacy; genocide of Native Americans fueled by a cultural belief in Manifest Destiny; enslavement of African people; racial segregation and its lingering effects in employment practices, education, housing, medical care, and public facilities; persistence of police murders and other acts of terrorism against ethnic communities and people; confining Japanese Americans and illegal immigrants in internment camps subject to food shortages and substandard sanitation; economic exploitation of and fearmongering among migrant workers; the racial disparity of rates of mass incarceration; palpable class divisions and financial inequality caused by an ever-widening racial wealth gap across ethnic groups; the dismantling of unions and social organizations that laudably fought to bring a sense of dignity to working class and poor people; and hegemonic cultural attitudes and vocal intolerance of new Americans are just a few of the politically documented abuses that have prevented the country from actualizing as a single “nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

An oft-celebrated aspect of its poetry, most audibly evoked in the poems of Walt Whitman, celebrates and idealizes the spirit of American democracy and its possibility, chiefly evidenced in its diversity of people and expansive landscapes. However, another important and equally principled tradition of poems written in the United States has long spoken to that space between the progressive idea of a country that promises equality, freedom, and liberty for its citizens and its long history of political injustice, systemic racism, oppression, and ethnic strife. In this regard, American poetry has served as a measure by which readers become acquainted with the difficulties and suffering of citizenship and how the United States might become a more perfect union. In this regard, because such poems, like the country itself, are born of a spirit of resistance and righteousness, tonally and thematically, they represent in literature the true spirit of what being an American means—they affirm founding values of freedom of speech and assembly in the promotion, pursuit, and expressions of a better tomorrow. In advancing a collective vision of what and who Americans are, these poems bear witness, challenge assumptions, and give substance to the country’s most elemental ideals of justice.

The poems gathered here document important historical struggles for dignity and justice; they praise political heroes; they express pride, frustration, and rage. They call for collective action and individual accountability, sometimes loudly yet always compellingly. They promote positive identities and self-esteem and make a claim for the sanctity of all humans. If you have any recommendations for poems to include in this collection, please contact us.