06/26/2026
A beautiful poem, for your reading pleasure:
"The baby I hold in my arms is a black baby.
Today I set him in the sun and
Sunbeams danced on his head.
The baby I hold in my arms is a black baby.
I toil, and I cannot always cuddle him.
I place him on the ground at my feet.
He presses the warm earth with his hands,
He lifts the sand and laughs to see
It flow through his chubby fingers.
I watch to discern which are his hands,
Which is the sand. . . .
Lo . . . the rich loam is black like his hands.
The baby I hold in my arms is a black baby.
Today the coal-man brought me coal.
Sixteen dollars a ton is the price I pay for coal.—
Costly fuel . . . 'tis said:—
If it is buried deep enough and lies hidden long enough
'Twill be no longer coal but diamonds. . . .
My black baby looks at me.
His eyes are like coals,
They shine like diamonds."
– "Black Baby," by Anita Scott Coleman originally published in the February 1929 issue of "Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life," the magazine of the National Urban League.
Anita Scott Coleman (1890–1960) was an American writer born in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico, and raised near Silver City, New Mexico. Her father was a Buffalo Soldier, and her mother had been enslaved in Texas. Coleman later lived in Los Angeles, where she continued to write and publish poetry, essays, and fiction.
Her work appeared in "Opportunity," "The Crisis," "The Messenger," and other leading Black publications of the early twentieth century. Today, she is recognized as an important Western voice of the Harlem Renaissance.
