“Heritage” in Color by Countee Cullen (review)

Figure 1.

The Salem United Methodist Church in Harlem, New York, was the site of numerous events for central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Among them were the 1928 wedding of Countee Cullen and Yolande Du Bois, a noted occasion where many of New York’s well-to-do Black residents flaunted their best fashion, and the funeral of poet James Weldon Johnson in 1938. Since its founding in 1881 as a mission to St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, the church had moved several times across Upper Manhattan. This building was purchased in 1923, when the congregation that had been located there, Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church, moved to the Bronx. Such a trajectory speaks to the importance of recognizing how Black individuals, communities, and organizations can repurpose existing buildings to their own needs—a group need not have financed or planned a building’s construction to make use of its space and become attached to it. Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Countee Cullen (1903–1946) is one of America’s most famous modern poets. He lived and died during “Jim Crow,” an era spanning from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 until the Civil Rights movements of the mid 1960s, during which the White majority enacted laws to uphold a racial caste system that treated Blacks as second-class citizens.¹ To shore up these laws, White supremacists in every profession, from academics to preachers, medical doctors, social Darwinists disseminated false theories about Black People being innately inferior to White People.² Across popular culture, from cinema to children’s toys, stereotypes abounded openly denigrating Black culture as uncivilized.³ Cullen challenged this oppression through his poetry, affirming the self-worth of Black American heritage, and claiming its rightful place in American society.

Born Countee LeRoy Porter, Cullen was raised in New York City’s Harlem by his grandmother, who died when he was a fifteen-year-old minor. He took the last name of his adopted parents, the prominent Reverend Frederick A. Cullen (1868–1946), pastor of Harlem’s largest Episcopal congregation, and Carolyn Belle Mitchell (d. 1932), both civil rights activists.⁴ Under their care, Cullen excelled academically and began winning poetry contests first as a high school student, then at New York University. By the time he graduated college in 1925, and before going on to pursue a masters in English at Harvard University, he had already published his first collection of poems, Color, which included “Heritage,” the poem that would make him famous for its celebration of Black culture and its condemnation of racism. His poems also appeared in The New Negro (1925), edited by Alain Locke (1885–1954); a defining anthology that captured the intellectual and artistic spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that initiated new research on Black history, confronted stereotypes, fought for social justice, and invented artistic forms such as jazz.⁵

Cullen contributed to a new understanding of poetry, and by extension intangible oral traditions, as a form of heritage. Poetry could transmit the memories of embodied cultural practices, rituals, and even the modest vernacular places where they took place. It could simultaneously denounce the pernicious legacy of slavery, which among its many horrible practices included attempting to erase those cultural memories. His stanzas expressed the hopeful sense that cultural knowledge could endure through poetic recitation.

Significantly, when Cullen wrote “Heritage” there were no government-owned sites in the United States expressly associated with Black Americans. The glaring omission was one way in which the structural racism of the Jim Crow era manifested itself in the preservation profession. As a teenager, Cullen witnessed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (his father was president of the NAACP’s Harlem branch) organize a national campaign to preserve the modest home of a famous Black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), in Dayton, Ohio. As prominent Black intellectuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) and Booker T. Washington...