ABSTRACT
The Germans needed a Stalingrad to cure them of their racial drunkenness. The white North American has been drunk for four hundred years. Ray Durem hopes that his poems will play some role in arousing that righteous anger and fury and willingness to die without which no people wins its liberty. It seems to him that the merit of his poems lies in the fact that he was the first Negro in the United States, in modern times, to embrace the nationalistic approach and reject the 'all men are brothers' school which wants to win over the white man by appealing to his good nature. Since Ray Durem was ten years old he has been conscious of the hypocrisy and viciousness of the criminal system in the United States, built on racial hatred. At the end of World War II, Ray Durem discovered that even the white radicals were not interested in a radical solution to the Negro question.
