Writing Black Modernism: Two Poems by Alice Dunbar-Nelson

• Published in: Legacy (Amherst, Mass.) Mass.), 2016-01, Vol.33 (2), p.392-397
• Main Authors: Gebhard, Caroline, Adams, Katherine, Zagarell, Sandra A
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic libraries; African American culture; African American studies; African Americans; American Revolution; Black history; Children; Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Moore (1875-1935); Features; Harlem Renaissance poetry; Hopkins, Pauline E (Pauline Elizabeth); Immigrants; Johnson, Georgia Douglas (1886-1966); Love poetry; Modernism; Modernist poetry; Poetry; Spirituals; War; Woodson, Carter G (1875-1950); World wars
• ISSN: 0748-4321; 1534-0643
• DOI: 10.5250/legacy.33.2.0392

Both speakers in his poem proudly proclaim "I Am an American," although his ending suggests the future belongs to the children of immigrants.3 Sharply critical of Lieberman's exclusion of Native and African Americans from the American "melting pot," Dunbar-Nelson voices the increasing exasperation of African Americans at being forced to segregate themselves by a racial label, while newcomers from distant shores were readily accepted as simply Americans. Yet overhead he sees a huge "airmada" of US warplanes, a reference to America's modern war machine and to African Americans' exclusion from the air force in World War I. Characteristic of modernist poems, "Harlem John Henry Views the Airmada" is a densely allusive montage of quotations and images that trace, among other things, African Americans' sacrifices in the nation's wars, from Crispus Attucks, the first casualty of the American Revolution, to the killing "No-Man's land" of War World I's battlefields.