ality, promised forty acres and a mule , only to be denied, to be shoved back down.Yes, black rage persisted. In fact, it was louder and more profound during Jim Crow than it was during slavery. In the title poem of her 1942 book, For My People, Margaret Walker Alexander writes,Let a new earth rise.Let another world be born.Let a bloody peace be written,. . .Let the dirges disappear.Let a race of men now rise and take control! (my emphasis) (436)In fact, with white concession of emancipation arose greater black boldness to express the rage, the violent desire or passion that boiled in the hearts of the black race for nearly three centuries. William Monroe Trotter, in his 1902 rebuke of Booker T. Washingtons conciliatory efforts, calling him a Benedict Arnold of the Negro race, proclaims, O for a black Patrick Henry to save his people from this stigma of cowardness [sic]; to rouse them from their lethargy to a sense of danger; to score the tyrant and to inspire his people with the spirit of those immortalwords: Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death. (202)Rage had taken new, revolutionary form.Two distinct voices of black rage during the Jim Crow era are T. Thomas Fortune and Marcus Garvey. Fortune, in his 1884 essay The Negro and the Nation, explains the plight of the black race during Reconstruction, proclaiming that nothing has been solved; slavery is gone, but the black man is not free. His essay concludes that revolution to throw off the white tyrant is inevitable. He states, The throne itself must be rooted out and demolished (134). He, as did Douglass, also warns of an impeding crisis: I declare that the American people are fostering in their bosoms a spirit of rebellion which will yet shake the pillars of popular government as they have never before been shaken . . . . All indications point to the fulfillment of such declaration. (133-4)And like David Walker, Fortune reminds America of humanitys history. Reiterating the thre...
