The Best Poems about the Black Experience in America

Thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, this is a moment when many people are earnestly seeking to learn more about how black people experience life in America. And there are several ways to do that effectively. One is through poetry. Our correspondent Abbie Martin Greenbaum has gathered a list of some of the best and most iconic poems written by leading black and African-American poets. Here you will find voices from many generations of writers, including some who are creating brilliant work today. Any one of these would be perfect poems to read right now to better understand Black Lives Matter and the African-American experience. And to celebrate the laureates who give voice to our community, which is still too often unheard.

Poems to read now to better understand Black Lives Matter

Unlike any other form of art, poetry is able to express the inexpressible. It can take an emotion or idea, and through a complex alchemy of language and imagery, transform something ephemeral into something concrete.

For this reason, poetry exists as an essential tool for gaining empathy and for understanding another person’s experiences. Many of the giants of literature in the black community wrote poetry – sometimes exclusively and sometimes as part of their broader oeuvre. And many would say that rap lyrics are their own essential form of poetry – but that’s for a future post.

In the meantime, here are 15 poems written by African-American poets, all of which speak to the experience of being black in America in different ways.

The best poems about the black experience in America

1. American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [But there never was a black male hysteria] by Terrance Hayes

A recipient of the MacArthur Grant, and winner National Book Award for Poetry, poet Terrance Hayes was born in South Carolina in 1971. He has since published numerous volumes of poetry, including the collection that holds this sonnet, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. The book contains seventy sonnets with the same title, all of which explore what it means to be American.

“But there was never a black male hysteria

Breaking & entering wearing glee & sadness

And the light grazing my teeth with my lighter”

Read the rest here.

2. A Brief History of Hostility by Jamaal May

May is the author of two poetry books, Hum (2013) and The Big Book of Exit Strategies (2016), and his work can also be found in 2014’s Best American Poetry anthology.

“In the beginning

there was war.

The war said let there be war

and there was war.

The war said let there be peace

and there was war. “

Read the rest here.

3. Ballad of Birmingham by Dudley Randall

Born in 1914, Dudley Randall was the founder of the Broadside Press, a publication that allowed young Black poets to showcase their work. A pioneering poet himself, Randall is best known for this piece, written in response to the 1963 white supremacist attack on the 16th Street Church.

“Mother dear, may I go downtown

Instead of out to play,

And march the streets of Birmingham

In a Freedom March today?”

Read the rest here.

4. Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith

A writer across many mediums, Patricia Smith is the author of multiple award-winning poetry collections. Published in 2016, Incendiary Art: Poems is a four-part volume highlighting the brutal violence so often enacted upon black men and women by the police and other law enforcement agencies. Smith wanted her work to center the voice of the mother, a perspective she felt was too often ignored.

“The city’s streets are densely shelved with rows

of salt and packaged hair. Intent on air,

the funk of crave and function comes to blows

with any smell that isn’t oil – the blare

of storefront chickens settles on the skin

and mango spritzing drips from razored hair.”

Read the rest here.

5. Let America by America Again by Langston Hughes

There are very few poets like Langston Hughes. Legendary Jazz poet and figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes helmed countless collections, novels, short stories, and plays. His poems provide an invaluable lens into black life in America. And perhaps the most iconic of them all is this one.

“Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain.

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)”

Read the rest here.

6. When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Martyr by Cortney Lamar Charleston

Born outside of Chicago, Charleston discovered his love of poetry during his time at the Wharton School, at the University of Pennsylvania. He refers to his work as “a marriage between art and activism,” exploring themes related to race and gender, family and friendship.

“is surely a peculiar answer for any teacher to receive when

asking a kindergartner, but on second take, what word best

describes me, crossbreed of butterfly and Super Fly aesthetics,

other than peculiar?”

Read the rest here.

7. Hanging Fire by Audre Lorde

Writer, activist, feminist, and icon, Audre Lorde confronts in her poetry all of the same injustices that she confronted within her life. This poem takes the perspective of a young girl going through adolescence, grappling with racism and sexism at a young age.

“Nobody even stops to think

about my side of it

I should have been on Math Team

my marks were better than his”

Read the rest here.

8. Still I Rise by Maya Angelou

Though you have likely already consumed the peerless canon of Maya Angelou, it is always worth rereading one of her most famous poems. Here she writes on the theme of resilience, as she does in so much of her work.

“You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”

Read the rest here.

9. Praise Song for the Day by Elizabeth Alexander

Born in 1962 in New York City, Elizabeth Alexander rose to the spotlight as a writer of poetry and essays. She wrote this poem for President Obama’s Inauguration, and famously read it aloud at the ceremony.

“Each day we go about our business,

walking past each other, catching each other’s

eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is

noise and bramble, thorn and din, each

one of our ancestors on our tongues.”

Read the rest here.

10. Dear White America by Danez Smith

From Saint Paul, Minnesota, Smith is the author of three books, the host Poetry Foundation’s poetry podcast, and the founder of Dark Noise Collective. They identify as genderqueer.

“i’ve left Earth in search of darker planets, a solar system revolving too near a black hole. i’ve left in search of a new God. i do not trust the God you have given us. my grandmother’s hallelujah is only outdone by the fear she nurses every time the blood-fat summer swallows another child who used to sing in the choir.”

Read the rest here.

11. The Way We Live Now by Evie Shockley

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Shockley is the author of five poetry books, including semiautomatic, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. The work is a reflection on the many grotesque realities of life in America, but also offers to be a balm for processing such trauma. This poem appears within the collection.

“when the cultivators of corpses are busy seeding

plague across vast acres of the land, choking schools

and churches in the motley toxins of grief, breeding

virile shoots of violence so soon verdant even fools

fear to tread in their wake ::”

Read the rest here.

12. blk girl art by Jamila Woods

A member of the Dark Noise Collective alongside Danez Smith and others, Jamila Woods is a singer-songwriter as well as a formidable poet. Her first album of music features voices like Chance the Rapper and Noname.

“Poems are bullshit unless they are eyeglasses, honey
tea with lemon, hot water bottles on tummies. I want
poems my grandma wants to tell the ladies at church
about.”

Read the rest here.

13. Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts and raised in Fairfield, California. She studied at Harvard University, where she joined the Dark Room Collective. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. Her collection Life on Mars won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 2017, Smith was appointed poet laureate of the United States.

In the title poem of her collection Wade in the Water, the poet describes a performance of the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters—who perform a ritual first performed by African slaves—and being transformed by watching it.

One of the women greeted me.
I love you, she said. She didn’t
Know me, but I believed her,
And a terrible new ache
Rolled over in my chest,
Like in a room where the drapes
Have been swept back. I love you,
I love you, as she continued
Down the hall past other strangers,
Each feeling pierced suddenly
By pillars of heavy light.
I love you, throughout
The performance, in every
Handclap, every stomp

Read the full poem here.

14. Nightstick [A Mural for Michael Brown] by Kevin Young

Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. He studied under Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido at Harvard University and, while a student there, became a member of the Dark Room Collective, a community of African American writers. His first book of poetry, Most Way Home, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Lucille Clifton, who describes the collection as re-creating “an inner history which is compelling and authentic and American.” Young is the poetry editor of The New Yorker and the director of New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Nightstick [A Mural for Michael Brown] is from Young’s most recent collection, Brown. In it, the poet takes as a starting point James Brown; John Brown’s raid; and Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. And meditates on all things “brown.” 

A finger
is a gun—
a wallet

is a gun, skin
a shiny pistol,
a demon, a barrel

already ready—
hands up
don’t shoot—

arms
not to bear but bare. Don’t

dare take
a left
into the wrong

skin.

Read the entire poem here.

15. Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987, Rita Dove served as the United States Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995. Her book-length cycle Thomas and Beulah is comprised of 44 poems; it’s the semi-fictionalized chronological story of her maternal grandparents. The couple came to Ohio during the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North during the early 20th century. The poet referred to the poems as “pearls on a necklace, in which each poem stands on its own. But together they form something greater.” 

In Dusting, Beulah is tending to housework and lost in a reverie about a long-ago crush.

Under her hand scrolls
and crests gleam
darker still. What
was his name, that
silly boy at the fair with
the rifle booth? And his kiss and
the clear bowl with one bright
fish, rippling
wound!

Not Michael—
something finer.

Read the entire work here.

The best poems about the black experience in America

Those are 15 of our favorite – and we think some of the best of all time – poems by black poets that help inform and speak to the African-American experience in all of its richness, depth and texture. What’s your favorite? Stay safe and healthy, dear reader.

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Abbie Martin Greenbaum grew up in New York City and currently lives in Brooklyn, where she drinks a lot of coffee and matches roommates together for a living. At Oberlin College, she studied English and Cinema, which are still two of her favorite things, along with dessert and musical theater. She believes in magic.

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