To the Negro Farmers of the United States
God washes clean the souls and hearts of you,
His favored ones, whose backs bend o’er the soil,
Which grudging gives to them requite for toil
In sober graces and in vision true.
God places in your hands the pow’r to do
A service sweet. Your gift supreme to foil
The bare-fanged wolves of hunger in the moil
Of Life’s activities. Yet all too few
Your glorious band, clean sprung from Nature’s heart;
The hope of hungry thousands, in whose breast
Dwells fear that you should fail. God placed no dart
Of war within your hands, but pow’r to start
Tears, praise, love, joy, enwoven in a crest
To crown you glorious, brave ones of the soil.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 9, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“To the Negro Farmers of the United States” was published in The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (J. L. Nichols, 1920).
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson was born on July 19, 1875, in New Orleans. Her mother was Patricia Wright, a seamstress, and her father, Joseph Moore, was a merchant marine. Nelson earned a teaching degree at Straight University (now, Dillard University) in 1892 at age seventeen. She then taught in the local public school system as an elementary school teacher until 1931.