Countee Cullen’s poetry in Color contemplates Black Americans’ fractured sense of self—at once spiritually tied to homelands where their ancestors were kidnapped and rooted in the white supremacist society where they live. With poems about love, tradition, the intertwined lives of Black people and whites, and the experience of a “Negro in a day like this,” Color is a profound early work of the Harlem Renaissance. The collection’s most famous poem is “Heritage”. (Summary by Mike Overby)
