Fortitude at the Height of the
Jim Crow Era

In 1913, the great James Weldon Johnson composed a poem to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Emancipation Day which reads in part:

To gain these fruits that have been earned.
To hold these fields that have been won.
Our arms have strained, our backs have burned.
Bent bare beneath a ruthless sun….

That for which millions prayed and sighed,
That for which tens of thousands fought.
For which so many freely died,
God cannot let it come to naught.