Philip C. Kolin’s beautiful new book, White Terror Black Trauma, serves as a guidebook on American history. Its poems lead the reader through a history most of us were never taught: the centuries of white violence inflicted on black people. From 1619 and the violence of American slavery, to the era of lynching, the Tulsa and Rosewood massacres, through Jim Crow, Scottsboro, the civil rights movement, up to Ferguson and the murder of George Floyd, these poems reveal the pattern and plan that has been white violence against black people. Third World Press gives us all a great gift by putting this book into the world.
Philip C. Kolin is a poet with an uncanny ability to write about history in ways that make the past, present. He writes in ways that let the reader feel present in a moment of history so that the reader can watch, listen, and feel. Kolin is expert at this, a poet of witness, a poet of conscience. You can order the book HERE. If you prefer, you can email Third World Press at twp3orders@gmail.com and order it that way.
In his moving introduction to these poems, Haki R. Madhubuti, the founder of Third World Press, writes that these poems serve as “…an introduction to America’s hidden Black history that to this day is unknown, or, if known, is being quieted and banned.” This truth makes these poems essential. Madhubuti also writes that “Philip C. Kolin is an exceptional word maker, an excellent researcher in the history and cultural lives of Black people / African people in America. He is a superior poet who has dedicated his life’s work in poetry and prose to unearthing story lines, telling hurtful truths, revealing the ugly, ugliest history of white racism…”
In this reflection/review, I will explore several poems from this moving book. I hope they give you a sense of the book’s power and vibrancy. I should also say here at the outset, that Philip C. Kolin is a friend of mine. We are poet-brothers and I am grateful to him, not only for his work, but for the goodness he brings into the world. America poetry would not be the robust choir it is without the voice of Philip C. Kolin.
While the book opens, as it should, with a poem titled “1619,” one of my favorite poems in this book is “Denmark Vesey.” The book’s third poem, introduces us to the leader of the 1822 rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina. Kolin writes of Vesey:
He rebelled against what his own white-given name
condemned him to — being owned by another.
He goes on to write a line that will always stay with me:
He became Exodus for thousands
Kolin shares elegies about Black heroes well-known and lesser-known. In “A Black Woman Called Moses,” he recalls Harriet Tubman:
Her Passovers brought brothers
and sisters out of misery so many
sorrows ago.
Remembering another woman of the 19th century, Kolin writes of Sojourner Truth:
She was determined to turn the world
right-side up again.
This poem concludes with two beautiful stanzas”
Across the centuries her adopted name
gave women a geography to selfdom.
Women in bell shaped skirts and broad brimmed
straw hats carried her words on posters to the polls.
Moving into the 20th century, Kolin shows us poems about the race massacres in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Greenwood, Florida. In his poem “Kristallnacht in Tulsa,” he describes:
40 square blocks of shops, banks, schools,
hospitals, churches, museums, a theater named
Dreamland, the capital of Black Wall Street
that never suffered a crash before.
The last stanza of this poem is classic Kolin. He turns the historical fact
into a deeper truth:
There were no windows left in Greenwood
because there was nothing left to see.
One of the lesser-known incidents of white violence against Black people is recalled in the poem, “The Rhythm Club on Old St. Catherine Street.” This club was set afire, on 4/23/1940, during a concert when it was filled with Black patrons. Kolin gives us the history in very plain language. The incident is so horrific it needs nothing more. Then he closes with this stanza:
The Club could not escape the dark history of old
St. Catherine Street, a slave market down one side
and a blacksmith’s down the other where they forged
chains. And the Rhythm Club in their midst.
One of the most haunting and powerful poems in this book is “America’s Largest Morgue.” This poem explores “the river,” as a place where Black bodies were often dumped. The poem does not name any specific murdered Black person, so that the poem can remember them all. As Kolin writes in the epigraph:
An inestimable number of nameless Black bodies, lynched, shot, or burned have been tossed ignominiously into rivers over four centuries of tragic American history.
The poem recalls that:
river ravens and cormorants
hunger to be pallbearers of the air,
America’s largest Black morgue
is the river bottom.
The poem closes with this devastating image:
Old Black men in muddy frockcoats
and neckties made from lynching rope
surface on moonless nights,
congregating on dissolving
levees proclaiming —
“There is no more deep to call.”
Like his poem on rivers, “What a Bus Can Be” considers the role of buses in Black history. This poem recalls Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Protest, but it also recalls Black Macon, Georgia pastors riding in a bus’ white section as a protest, and, Black Tallahassee children riding in the white section as protest. In these poems, Kolin sees the small moments of history made large. He sees the buses as churches, as places where injustice is confronted and the “beloved community” can be built.
He writes: A bus can be a rolling church too.
Before moving into Kolin’s poems from the 21st century, I have to comment on “On a Photo of the Lorraine Motel.” This poem is a stunning chronicle of the place where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was martyred, April 4, 1968. This poem explores a photograph by Joseph Louw.
Part of this poem offers us these lines:
He was shot
at Vespertime, when prayers are said
at monasteries and cathedrals. A high velocity
bullet smashed his jaw (the pulpit for his words).
Throats filled with the blues mourned that night
all through Memphis, as the Mississippi wailed–
The book’s final poems walk through some of the 20th centuries worst American moments. In “Palm Trees Didn’t Grow That Year in Cleveland, we remember 12-year-old Tamir Rice. In “Mother Emmanuel Weeps for Her Children,” we remember the 2015 massacre at the Charleston church, founded by Denmark Vesey. In “2.23” we remember the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia while on a run. These elegies do just what elegies are supposed to do: they offer a kind of resurrection, they do not let us forget.
A most powerful poem near the book’s end is “Golgotha Outside Cups.” This poem recalls the murder of George Floyd outside Cups Convenience Store in Minneapolis. Kolin makes a bold step here, connecting the police murder of George Floyd to the Roman execution of Jesus of Nazareth. Some people may not like this connection, but I find it apt and instructive. In this poem, Kolin shows us these connections:
You could almost see Jerusalem from south Minneapolis.
Jesus fell to the ground three times; George was never
allowed to get up; he was spurned into the asphalt.
One line late in the poem took my breath away:
His voiced cried out “Mama,” which sounded like “Abba.”
This is not an easy book to read. It’s not a book to be devoured in one sitting. But it is necessary and vital. While it is about violence and death, it is also about life. This book requires confession and lament. It should be taught in every school, read in every church, synagogue, and mosque, recited on every street corner. This book is the history many people don’t want us to know.
Philip C. Kolin’s poems provoke, sear, and teach. They break us open so that light can come in. We all need these poems. I hope you will read them, share them, then read and share them again.
Order White Terror Black Trauma HERE.
Joseph Ross 