Walter Everette Hawkins is one of the more obscure, but one of the more unusual Afro-American poets of the early twentieth century, an important figure in the transition of black literature from the genteel modes of the latter nineteenth century to the flowering of black militancy often identified with the Harlem Renaissance. A poet of strong political convictions, Hawkins produced work that often showed fire and ambition. Such pioneering critics of black literature as Sterling Brown, Benjamin Brawley, and Robert Kerlin singled out Hawkins for both his poetic and thematic boldness.

Hawkins was born in Warrenton, North Carolina, in 1883 (several sources give 1886 as Hawkins's year of birth; however, Hawkins himself, in a 1915 Who's Who entry, cited the earlier year). He was the thirteenth child of ex-slave parents who were independent farmers, and the much younger brother of the eminent John R. Hawkins (1862-1939). John R. Hawkins was working...