Monday's Poetry: "Comes the Colored Hour"

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist


Monday evening, and as the national holiday honoring American civil rights visionary, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, draws to a close, I feel that a selection by Langston Hughes is in order.  The following, Comes the Colored Hour, is a bit of satire that looks at an America where the roles and rules of skin color are reversed.  Mr. Hughes undoubtedly smiled sadly as he held the America that was up to a mirror and saw the opposite image, an image that would have been no more fair or just than the one to which he and his race has been consigned by fate.

America is a better place today thanks to the work of people like Langston Hughes and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  There is still much left to overcome, but many significant barriers between the races have fallen thanks to the bravery and determination of people like them.

Comes the Colored Hour
by Langston Hughes 

Comes the Colored Hour:
Martin Luther King is Governor of Georgia,
Dr. Rufus Clement his Chief Adviser,
A. Philip Randolph the High Grand Worthy.
In white pillared mansions
Sitting on their wide verandas,
Wealthy  Negroes have white servants,
White sharecroppers work the black plantations,
And colored children have white mammies:
Mammy Faubus
Mammy Eastland
Mammy Wallace
Dear, dear darling old white mammies--
Sometimes even buried with our family.
Dear old
Mammy Faubus! 

Culture, they say, is a two-way street:  

Hand me my mint julep, mammy.

Hurry up!
Make haste!