From The Dark Tower

The poem presents a damning indictment of racial discrimination. Black people face discrimination on all fronts. They are not allowed to reap the fruits of their labor because others take these fruits from them. The speaker has white people in mind as the guilty party, as readers in the 1920s and beyond would recognize straightaway. This is made more explicit in the sestet, with the images of light (stars and sunlight) symbolizing white people contrasted with Black people.

The speaker wholly identifies with the oppressed race, as the use of the plural pronoun “we” shows. The speaker shares in their distress and experiences the same injustice. There is no doubting the severity of the situation the speaker portrays. The words “abject and mute” (Line 3) suggest demoralization and helplessness on the part of the oppressed people; the words might equally have been applied to enslaved peoples. The fact that enslavement had been abolished 60 years before Cullen wrote this poem suggests that little progress had been made in establishing civil rights and justice for Black people.

In this poem, Black people are undervalued in every sense of the word, both as human beings and as workers, as Line 4, about “lesser men” who “hold their brothers cheap” conveys.