Back to Letter ExcerptBy Countee Cullen
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger,"
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.
When Martin Luther King used the word ‘nigger’ in his letter to clergymen, he was well aware of the power that word had in the black community. This poem is an example of how powerful that word can be. It details the experience of a child in Baltimore who hears the word in the city of Baltimore. Two things stand out about the poem. First, although the child was in Baltimore for quite some time, the only thing he remembered about the city was his experience of being called a ‘nigger’ and second, that both the people that call and are called this word are children.
There are other points within this letter where King refers to the affects of racism on children. He was making the point to the Clergymen that if racism was not stopped as soon as possible, more children would be the victim of senseless racial epithets. He was also showing them that black children would not be the only victims of racism. White children would also learn racist ways and the situation would never get better.