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Color, Countee Cullen

Zea E-Books in American Studies

Poet, playwright, novelist, graduate of DeWitt Clinton High, New York University, and Harvard University, Countee Cullen (1903–1946) emerged as a leading literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Color (1925), his first published book of poetry, confronts head-on what W.E.B. DuBois called “the problem of the 20th century—the problem of the color line.” The work includes 72 poems, such as the following:

Incident (For Eric Walrond)

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, …