Chapter 5 - Anti-Lynching Poetry and the Poetics of Protest

Summary

Although scholarship on anti-lynching literature generally is robust, most focuses on prose and drama. In parallel, although increasing attention is being devoted to turn-of-the-century poetry, this discourse still often diminishes women’s contributions to this oeuvre by denigrating the aesthetic qualities and political intentions of most female poets in this period other than Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Addressing both gaps, this chapter examines anti-lynching verse by three undeservedly little-known authors: Priscilla Jane Thompson (1871–1942), Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman (1870–1922), and Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer (1868–1936). All have been nearly ignored, except for discussions of their dialect poetry. Yet close attention to examples of their formalist verse demonstrates that these poets were not anomalies in their era and instead constituted a key link in a tradition of Black women’s poetics of protest, traceable to Harper and to Phillis Wheatley before her. Ultimately, their poems on this subject offer a new lens on this decade, often unfairly viewed as a pre-Harlem fallow period in African American women’s poetry and political contributions.