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“America, it is to thee, / Thou boasted land of liberty,— / It is to thee I raise my song, / Thou land of blood, and crime, and wrong.” In America and Other Poems, his first and only book of poems, J.M. Whitfield rejects the myth of liberty, longing instead for when the sufferings of the enslaved “shall be redressed.”
About the author
J.M. Whitfield (1822-1871) was an African American poet and abolitionist. Born in New Hampshire to Joseph Whitfield, who escaped slavery in Virginia, and Nancy, the daughter of a freed slave, Whitfield was educated in Exeter until his father's death. Having lost his mother at the age of seven, Whitfield was orphaned at just nine years old. Nothing is known about his life until 1839, when records show him as the owner of a barber shop and a home in Buffalo, New York. In his free time, Whitfield published his own writing, and in 1853 found publication with James S. Leavitt of Buffalo for a small volume of poems.
America and Other Poems-dedicated to his friend Martin Delany-earned him a reputation as a leading black poet of his time. His poems on abolition, American history, nature, and political figures appeared in William Lloyd Garrison's
The Liberator and Frederick Douglass'
The North Star. Alongside Delany, Whitfield became a fierce advocate for the Colonization Movement, marking a major break from the abolitionist faction represented by Douglass. In the early 1860s, Whitfield moved to San Francisco, where he opened another barber shop and joined the Prince Hall Freemasons. He was the grand uncle of Elizabeth Pauline Hopkins, a pioneering novelist and playwright.
