JOPLIN – Black poets have contributed greatly to the English literature of the United States.
For example, Joplin-born Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was a vibrant contributor to the Harlem Renaissance, an African American literary movement of the 1920s and 1930s. His poetry has become a must-read in most high school and college classes studying American literature. But, despite his poetic ingenuity and power, Hughes was hardly a man of faith – at least, not a man of the biblical Christian faith. He sparked controversy with a 1932 poem, “Goodbye, Christ,” in which the poet tells Christ to “beat it” and “make way for a new guy with no religion at all.”
Langston Hughes
Though some scholars suggest Hughes was more concerned with faith than this poem suggests, he seems to have departed from the clearly evangelical faith of America’s earliest black poets: namely, Phillis Wheatley (d. 1784) and Jupiter Hammon (d. 1806).
Phillis Wheatley
Born sometime around 1754, Wheatley was enslaved and taken from West Africa to America as a young girl. She survived a journey across the Atlantic that killed a quarter of passengers aboard the slave-ship – a ship itself named Phillis. She was purchased by a Boston merchant, John Wheatley, to help his wife, Susanna. The Wheatleys were devout congregationalists, and they passed their evangelical faith onto the young girl and educated her.
At the age of 13, Phillis became a published poet, writing an elegy on the death of the famed evangelist, George Whitefield. Her later writings also reflected her Christian faith, as well as slavery’s inconsistency with Christianity.
In 1774, Wheatley joined efforts to establish Christian mission efforts in Ghana and Sierra Leone – a mission effort cut short by the Revolutionary War. Phillis died in 1784, in her early 30s.
Jupiter Hammon
LONG ISLAND – With the publication of his 1761 poem, “An Evening Thought” (shown above), Jupiter Hammon became North America’s first black poet to be published.
Born into slavery on Long Island, New York, in 1711, Jupiter Hammon was educated by the Anglican Church’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. In 1761, Hammon published his first poem. But, unlike Langston Hughes’ poem, “Goodbye, Christ,” Hammon’s 88-line poem openly praises the Lord Jesus. It begins,
“Salvation comes by Jesus Christ alone,
The only Son of God;
Redemption now to everyone,
That love his holy Word.”
Titled “An Evening Thought,” the poem is also often called “An Evening Prayer” or “An Evening’s Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries.” With this poem, Hammon became the first published African American poet in North America. Hammon died in 1806.