work. EUGENE B. REDMOND’s observation in
Drumvoices, “There is not one poem in the book
that cannot be aesthetically or stylistically called
‘poetry’ ” (285), is universally shared by Turner,
Charles T. Davis, and ROBERT HAYDEN. Dodson
is lauded for the poems effectively written in
“Negro folk speech,” including the BLUES, on the
one hand; on the other hand, his signature poems
written during World War II, in which inner and
spiritual turmoil, anguish, and death are major
themes, have been acclaimed for their powerful
tropes and conceits. “Black Mother Praying,” in
which the speaker prays for peace, not only for
the war in which her son and other black sons are
fighting and dying but also, ironically, for peace in
the urban streets of America, where “freedom is
being crossed out”—where black males are being
lynched—is exemplary of both styles.
Lord, I’m gonna say my say real quick and
simple:
You know bout this war that’s bitin the skies
And gouging out the earth.
(Powerful Long Ladder 8)Dodson’s vision of a world in which, as he tells
O’Brien, “people are people, they are not black or
white or anything. They are themselves. People.
And they have their own worth” (57) is shared
by the mother at the end of her prayer: “Lord, let
us all see the golden wheat together.” Dodson’s
other collections of poems are The Harlem Book
of the Dead (1978) and The Confession Stone: Song
Cycles, which, “filled with stories, diaries, and re-
membrances of Jesus,” Dodson described as “my
most dedicated work” (O’Brien, 58). The recipi-
ent of a Rosenwald and a Guggenheim Fellowship,
Dodson rejected the philosophy of the architects
of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, declaring, “The
Black writer has no obligation to ‘blackness’ ”
(O’Brien, 57).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davis, Charles T., and Daniel Walden, eds. On Being
Black: Writings by Afro-Americans from Frederick
Douglass to the Present. Greenwich, Conn.: Faw-
cett Publications, 1970.
Hayden, Robert, ed. Kaleidoscope: Poems by Ameri-
can Negro Poets. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1967.
O’Brien, John, ed. Interviews with Black Writers. New
York: Liveright, 1973.
Redmond, Eugene. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-
American Poetry: A Critical History. Garden City,
N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1976.
Turner, Darwin T., ed. Black American Literature: Po-
e t r y. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publish-
ing Company, 1969.
Wilfred D. SamuelsDouglass, Frederick (1818–1895)
Born into slavery in 1818, Frederick Douglass
transformed himself from an illiterate slave into
a leading abolitionist orator, influential journalist,
and well-known public speaker who was celebrated
in Europe and received in the White House. His
three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Fred-
erick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bond-
age and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of
Frederick Douglass (1893), not only are the finest
examples of what came to be known as the slave
narrative, but also placed Douglass among such
19th-century literary giants as Ralph Waldo Emer-
son, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman in
affirming the importance of the first-person nar-
rative voice as the essential literary representation
of American identity and individualism.
Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augus-
tus Washington Bailey in Tuckahoe near Easton,
Talbot County, Maryland. His mother, Har-
riet Bailey, was a literate slave who died when he
was seven while his father was reported to be his
mother’s white master, a member of the Auld fam-
ily. Douglass spent the first six years of his life with
his grandmother before being sent to Wye House,
where he came to understand and experience the
many injustices and horrors of the slave system.
From here Thomas (one of many possible fathers)
and Lucrecia Auld would send him to Baltimore in
1826 to live with Thomas’s brother, Hugh, to be a
companion to Hugh Auld’s young son, Tommy. In
Baltimore young Frederick learned to read, initially144 Douglass, Frederick