Countee Cullen Quotes
Not for myself I make this prayer, But for this race of mine That stretches forth from shadowed places Dark hands for bread and wine.
Cullen, Countee. "Pagan Prayer." Color, Harper & Brothers, 1925, p. 20.
He was assassinated for his anti-apartheid views and speeches. Most clerics of the Dutch Reformed Church had traditionally supported the Afrikaner colonial view of Black inferiority and apartheid. Heyns was an exception and he was named by Nelson Mandela as a “martyr of his country.”
Humphrey was the Mayor of Minneapolis then.
The issue of slavery which had been suppressed in Congress for the first decades of the nation broke out when Missouri statehood was considered. By previous agreement, slavery was not even discussed in Congress but the time period elapsed. Tallmadge not only proposed that no more slaves could come into Missouri {613176} but most shocking to the Southerners was that every person born in the new state would be free at the age of 25. In a generation, there would be no more slavery in Missouri and there would be no economic compensation for slave owners at all. The House of Representatives accepted the amendment, but it failed in the Senate. At that time, Senators were not elected by voters but were appointed by the state legislators and the Southern slave states had a disproportionate share of the senate from a population point of view. But what this quotation shows clearly that a majority of the country in 1819 were opposed to slavery and were willing to end it without compensation.
Mitchell was the first African American to be elected to the United States Congress as a Democrat. The few other Blacks were Republicans from the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. The President was FDR and Mitchell was elected in the midst of the Great Depression.
Countee Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance.
