dime piece

Mob Voices: (snarling)

Quick! Quick! Death there!

The chair! The electric chair!

8th Boy:

No chair!

Too long have my hands been idle.

Too long have my brains been dumb.

Now out of the darkness

The new Red Negro will come:

That's me!

- LANGSTON HUGHES,

"SCOTTSBORO LIMITED"

The 1930s and 1940s saw the publication of significant works by such African­

American poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, Waring

Cuney, Frank Marshall Davis, Owen Dodson, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes,

Melvin Tolson, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright.

Yet African-American poetry of the 1930s and 1940s has received little serious and

focused scholarly consideration as a whole. The few studies that do treat poetry by

black authors during those decades do so only as part of a larger survey (as in the case

of Eugene Redmond Drumvoices) or as a coda to the study of an earlier period of lit­