Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/256

234 rumbling of thunder, the lightning will one day leap. A poet born and reared in South Carolina, Joshua Henry Jones, Jr., appeals from man’s inhumanities to God’s prevailing power in passionate stanzas of which this is the first, the rest being like:

They’ve lynched a man in Dixie. O God, behold the crime. And midst the mad mob’s howling How sweet the church bells chime! They’ve lynched a man in Dixie. You say this cannot be? See where his lead-torn body Mute hangs from yonder tree.

This or a similar lynching provoked the following lines from another, Walter Everette Hawkins, in a poem entitled A Festival in Christendom. After relating that the white people of a certain community were on their way to church on the Sabbath day, the poem continues:

And so this Christian mob did turn From prayer to rob, to lynch and burn. A victim helplessly he fell To tortures truly kin to hell; They bound him fast and strung him high, They cut him down lest he should die Before their energy was spent In torturing to their heart’s content.