“Mr. Sweeney is, of course, a member of the Negro race and writes from what might be called the inside.  He knows of Negro aspirations, of Negro strivings and of Negro accomplishments.  He has had an experience of many years as writer and lecturer for and to Negroes and he knows probably as well as anyone wherein the Negro feels that ‘the shoe is made to pinch.’  The poem, it seems to me, possesses intrinsic merit and I feel quite sure that Mr. Sweeney’s appeal to the great American people, for fair play will not fall upon deaf ears.  Booker T. Washington.”

     The “white man’s burden” has been
       told the world,
     But what of the other fellow’s—­
     The “lion’s whelp”?

     Lest you forget,
     May he not lisp his? 
     Not in arrogance,
     Not in resentment,
     But that truth
     May stand foursquare?

     This then,
     Is the Other Fellow’s Burden.

* * * * *

     Brought into existence
     Through the enforced connivance
     Of a helpless motherhood
     Misused through generations—­
     America’s darkest sin!—­
     There courses through his veins
     In calm insistence—­incriminating irony
     Of the secrecy of blighting lust! 
     The best and the vilest blood
     Of the South’s variegated strain;
     Her statesmen and her loafers,
     Her chivalry and her ruffians.

     Thus bred,
     His impulses twisted
     At the starting point
     By brutality and sensuous savagery,
     Should he be crucified? 
     Is it a cause for wonder
     If beneath his skin of many hues—­
     Black, brown, yellow, white—­
     Flows the sullen flood
     Of resentment for prenatal wrong
     And forced humility?

     Should it be a wonder
     That the muddy life current
     Eddying through his arteries,
     Crossed with the good and the bad,
     Poisoned with conflicting emotions,
     Proclaims at times,
     Through no fault of his,
     That for a surety the sins of fathers
     Become the heritage of sons
     Even to the fourth generation? 
     Or that murdered chastity,
     That ravished motherhood—­
     So pitiful, so helpless,
     Before the white hot,
     Lust-fever of the “master”—­
     Has borne its sure fruit?

     You mutter, “There should be no wonder.” 
     Well, somehow, Sir Caucasian,
     Perhaps southern gentleman,
     I, marked a “whelp,” am moved
     To prize that muttered admission.

* * * * *

     But listen, please: 
     The wonder is—­the greater one—­
     That from Lexington to San Juan hill
     Disloyalty never smirched
     His garments, nor civic wrangle
     Nor revolutionary ebullition
     Marked him its follower.