2015/08/26 by Rebecca Jo Plant, Frances Clarke · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Race, History, and American Society #American History and Culture #American Constitutional Law and Politics
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jav351
openalex publication_date 2015/08/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
James Weldon Johnson was hard at work on his book Black Manhattan in the summer of 1930, having taken leave from his position as executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp). One morning, after reading a newspaper article that filled him with disgust, he “threw aside” his manuscript to write a satirical poem. The offending news concerned the gold star mother and widow pilgrimages, a federal government program that would send nearly 6,700 women to Europe to visit the graves of their sons and husbands who had perished in World War I. Johnson read that “Negro gold-star mothers would not be allowed to sail on the same ship with the white gold-star mothers” but would instead travel separately on “a second-class vessel.” The poem he penned in protest of that treatment, “Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day,” never directly refers to the women, however; instead, it dramatizes the plight of the betrayed and effaced black male soldier. In the poem's fantastical climax, set in the nation's capital at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Ku Klux Klan, and veterans' groups recoil in horror when the soldier is revealed to be black: “Through it, at last, his towering form loomed/big and bigger—/‘Great God Almighty! Look!’ they cried/‘he is a nigger!’”1