Black American Prison Poetry: a History This excerpt is from a copyrighted publication and is printed here with the express permission of the authors,their agents, and their publisher.

Most of America's contemporary prison poets are black. That fact is not coincidence. It is a fact of history, part of the evolution of American prison poetry as a form.

America has long been fond of imprisoning people. Even today America imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other country. America has a penchant for imprisoning people collectively by race. During World War II American citizens of Japanese descent living in California were rounded up like cattle and stuck in relocation centers in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. They were given the "opportunity" to reclaim the desert while US soldiers stood guard around these concentration camps.

In the white man's push west Mexicans and American Indians were murdered wholesale as their lands were stolen under the justification of, as John L. O'Sullivan's termed it, "Manifest Destiny." Most of the American Indians who survived were imprisoned in concentration camps we still euphemistically call reservations. We justify these camps by saying that they preserve the Indians' heritage and culture. Presently, the Indians are not restricted to these reservations; however, so little of white American mainstream education is made easily available to them that many of them find themselves heavily handicapped if they try competing in mainstream society and business. Like all prisoners, their separation from society has made particularly difficult their assimilation into that society.

America's largest racially based imprisonment was that of black Africans, and out of their enslavement came a rich and powerful body of poetry. The slave songs were the first poems produced by a truly American prison system.

Although many white people were writing poetry in Colonial days and early days of independence, the first gut-level American poems were the songs of the black slaves that America imported from Africa. The early white poets were, as Emerson later noted in his essays, imitators of their European counterparts. Jupiter Hammon, the first American black poet, was a slave, was literate, and was, like his white masters, an imitator of the Europeans and of the stilted and antiquated language most of them used in their poetry. In his introduction to The Forerunners; Black Poets in America, Gayle Addison says that Hammon praised the white man as God's instruments for rescuing black people from barbarism and damnation:

O come you pious youth! Adore
The Wisdom of thy God
In bringing thee from distant shore
To learn his holy word.
Thou mightst been left behind,
Amidst a dark abode;
God's tender mercy still combin'd,
Thou hast the holy word.

This is a long way from poetry that cries out for freedom or speaks for a new land and its people, but, among America's early black poets, Hammon represents the exception -- not the rule.

Emerson praised Walt Whitman as an American original, but he failed to recognize the most original of all American poets -- the slaves he sought to free. In "The American Scholar" he said, "Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made." He recognized that new language, language that spoke of and for the people of the land, came from the people who worked the land, people who were not strongly influenced by the written works of people foreign to the land. But somehow it never occurred to Emerson to look directly to the largest class of people in America that both labored and was sequestered from other poetic influences. He failed to recognize the slaves' work songs as legitimate and original American poetry.

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