Lindsay Garbutt: This is the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Lindsay Garbutt, managing editor. 

Since 2005, Poetry magazine has collected short essays on how and why people read poems. We call the series “The View From Here.” In our June issue, Justice Leah Ward Sears writes about the 1937 poem “For My People” by Margaret Walker. Walker’s first collection of poetry was called For My People and won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1942. Walker was the first Black woman to ever receive the award. She was 22 years old when the poem first appeared in print. 

I spoke with Justice Sears on May 5th about why “For My People” has been an important resource for her throughout her life. Twenty days after we spoke, George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by a white police officer in the Powderhorn community of Minneapolis, Minnesota. We know George Floyd’s name, but there are so many names we don’t know. 

I’m recording this introduction amid waves of protest across the country, calling for an end to the policing and systemic oppression of Black lives. We need the immediate dismantling of institutional racism in all spheres of society, including right here at the Poetry Foundation. I want to thank our poetry communities for holding us accountable. 

To learn more about the work that is underway at the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine, you can read the Open Letter of Commitment to Our Community on poetryfoundation.org. 

I am so grateful to be listening to Margaret Walker’s “For My People” today, and to Justice Sears for her ongoing, integral work.

Lindsay Garbutt: I wanted to start by talking about how you’re doing and where you are. I know that since the COVID-19 pandemic began, so much has changed so quickly. So, I’d love to hear how you are, where you are, what your life is like right now.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Well, thank you so much. Well, Lindsay, at this point I am in my office at home. I’m with the law firm of Smith, Gambrell & Russell, it’s a, oh, 150-year-old law firm that’s been around in Atlanta for a long time. They shut down for the first time ever. And all the lawyers, paralegals, staff are all working remotely. So, I’m working in what was had been my husband’s office, but now we share, except he won’t come in anymore.

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: It’s just basically [LAUGHS] my office and he’s taken over the bedroom. This is an interesting time. Let’s just say that.

Lindsay Garbutt: And is your work different at all in this new remote situation? Or do you … are you still able to do everything just from home?

Justice Leah Ward Sears: I can’t do everything because, you know, I’m an appellate lawyer and most of the courts in Georgia—I’m in Atlanta, Georgia—and the chief just ... the current chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court has instituted what’s called a judicial emergency. Courts can force people to come, like jurors and lawyers and witnesses, and you don’t want to be, you know, forcing people to come and be with crowds at a time like that. So there are no jury trials, there are no hearings, everything’s virtual. I’m working hard, but it’s a very, very different way of working.

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah. I can imagine. One of the reasons we have you on the podcast today is because you wrote a piece for the magazine about why you read poetry and what poems are important to you, in particular Margaret Walker’s “For My People,” which you talk about as a poem that you befriended a long time ago, and I love that verb that you use. Could you talk about how this poem has been a friend to you?

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Well, I’m an African-American female. And as I made my way through the judicial system in this state, in Georgia, all too often, I was the only—not only African-American female—but sometimes the only female. I was the first woman of any color on the Georgia Supreme Court, in a state that sometimes is often progressive, but sometimes not so much, as history has shown us. And it’s been difficult sometimes. And I befriended that poem because sometimes I wanted, you know, I was never going to give up. But there were times when I just wanted to give up, I just can’t keep doing this. I ran for office statewide three times, always opposed. A lot of people didn’t understand the way I thought or my views on things. You know, I found the poem and it was like, “For My People.” She was saying I’m for my people. And there was hope at the end. And I was thinking, I’m doing all this for my people and not just for black women, but for, as the last stanza is, people everywhere, people of good will, you know, people, all people, who come together because they’re, you know, you don’t have to be Black and female or both to know what suffering can be, even when you’re in an office or even when you are wearing a black robe. So, it was a balm for me to get through what were often very tough times. And I thought I was all alone. I was never alone, but I thought sometimes I was all alone.

Lindsay Garbutt: I’d love to listen together to Margaret Walker reading from “For My People.” Is there a particular section of the poem you’d like to hear read?

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Okay. So, you’ve got a recording of the poet reading it?

Lindsay Garbutt: Yes.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Wow. I’ve never heard that, I would love … oh yeah, no, shoot. Maybe the last couple of paragraphs, because that’s a little bit more uplifting.

Margaret Walker:

(READS POEM)

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
     the dark of churches and schools and clubs
     and societies, associations and councils and committees and
     conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
     devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
     preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
     false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
    trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
    all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
    rise and take control.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: That’s fantastic. Her voice is so much better than my voice when I read it because it’s authentic. I mean, that’s the real deal, you know, you can tell she really has been through it. Wow.

Lindsay Garbutt: I think your reading is also very beautiful, but I agree. She …

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Oh, thank you. That’s the real deal.

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah. It’s amazing to hear a poet read their own work. And I love that you chose this poem too, because it was actually first published in Poetry magazine in 1937. It’s a real part of our archive and our history that I don’t think many people, or not enough people, know about. And I’ve just, I’ve just been thinking about this sort of passage of time. You know, Margaret Walker was born in 1915. You mentioned in your piece that you were born about 40 years later. And, you know, I just wonder how this poem was received when it was written? And how do you think we receive it now? And how do you think your reading of the poem has changed with time?

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Oh, that’s an excellent question. I don’t know how it would have been received in 1915. I’m a good clip past that. I don’t even know how it would have been perceived in 1955, the year I was born. I’m turning 65 this year, you know, and a lot of it, I think, depends on who you are. I think it could be a turn off, even if you’re an African American, it could be a turn off to some who don’t really want to acknowledge the pain, the suffering, the somberness, the difficulty. But for others, it’s basically, you know, walks you through the history of the African American in this country. So, for some young people, it could be a real history lesson in pain and passion and all that kind of thing. So, I think it just depends on where your head is. For me like even now during this terrible pandemic, I find it inspirational. Just like “let a new world be born” because a new world really has to be born. I mean, we need to take this suffering and make something out of it because the things are, to me, are going to hell pretty fast. So, I’m hoping her last stanza, “let us come together, let a new world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky...” It applies right now, during this pandemic, has nothing to do with race. And then it has everything to do with race because in this country, everything has to do with race or ethnicity or gender, et cetera, et cetera.

Lindsay Garbutt: You write in the piece about Langston Hughes’s "I Look at the World" as another poem that has stayed with you throughout your life and also has this sort of hopeful note at the end. Could you talk about how and when you first came across that poem and why it stayed with you?

Justice Leah Ward Sears: That was a poem I first read when I went to Cornell University in upstate New York in 1972 and took a lot of the first Black studies programs. And we studied this a lot then. And, you know, this is about segregation: "I look then at the silly walls / Through dark eyes and a dark face—/ And this is what I know: / That all these walls oppression builds / Will have to go!" And then the last part, which I really like again, just like the Walker piece: "And I see that my own hands can make / The world that’s in my mind. / Then let us hurry, comrades, / The road to find." Comrades, I guess is sort of a, I think he was a communist for a while, or at least studied communism when that was really cool. And what he’s basically saying is that we can, and you can with your own hands, make a new world. A new world that’s in your mind. And that’s just something I believe, if you can become … be born in 1955 in Heidelberg, Germany to an army officer and his teacher wife and become a first female chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, where segregation was raging at the time, at 36 years old, then you can do anything that’s in your mind, really, you really can.

Lindsay Garbutt: That’s an amazing story. Were your parents interested in poetry or anyone in your family? How did you first come to poems as something that you’ve befriended?

Justice Leah Ward Sears: My father used to write little, cute, small poems. Like, you know, I remember once he, I don’t remember exactly the point but “My oldest son, I could hold in my hand, like a little bread box.” A little diddy kind of type thing and all throughout my family, I mean, I have a niece who is a poet, you know, and of course lawyers are writers. That’s what we do. We read and we write. And we read and we write and the problem with lawyering is it could awfully dull. So sometimes you just got to put the brief away and just go off and write some feeling, you’ve got to unveil a different dimension of yourself. And that’s—I actually write essays and op-eds, I’m not really a poet, but I write essays and op-eds about what I see and you’ll find elements of their little poems, just in the speeches that I give. I’m not saying that my speeches are as good as Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” but if you really take the “Gettysburg Address” apart, that is a poem really. So, I like to have essays or eulogies, when I give them, they kind of have that beat that evokes passion.

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah. I think you can really sense that in your essay for their magazine, I think you do such a beautiful job of sort of using some of the techniques that Margaret Walker uses, the sort of listing of various roles and various types of experience and people to sort of bring the point home. And I think that that’s, you know, an element of great writing, no matter what genre you’re writing in.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Yeah, Lindsay, I mean, I even try to, believe it or not, do that in my briefs or during oral argument, because those are the things that capture people. And so I’ve tried to get better and better at that.

Lindsay Garbutt: And that kind of brings me to another question I was going to ask, which is, I think some people think of poetic language and legalistic languages as two opposite sides of a spectrum. Do you see it that way? Or do you see, as someone who has intimate experience with both, what do you think the relationship is between these two different types of languages?

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Well, bad legal writing is at the opposite end of the spectrum of good poetry. And there is a lot of bad legal writing. Okay? The best legal writing, the best legal minds, is aligned with some of the best poetry ever written really. I mean, I understand why it takes a lot of effort to get there and lawyers are on the billable hour system. So, you know, you don’t want to charge your client to create a masterpiece, but it will be a masterpiece. Does that make sense?

Lindsay Garbutt: Absolutely.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Yeah, so, I mean, when you’re writing for on commission, for example, you have to take the client’s pocketbook into account.

Lindsay Garbutt: Right. But I think the attention to clarity and to communicating something is important in both. Absolutely.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Exactly. Exactly.

Lindsay Garbutt: You mentioned before, I just want to reiterate for the listeners that you were the first woman and the youngest person to ever be elected to the Georgia Supreme Court, you were also the first African American female chief justice of a state supreme court in the United States entirely. And I bet you’ve heard that many, many times over the years. But I just wanted to ask you, what is it like to be a public figure and to publicly hold that kind of space of shifting the status quo and making a new world?

Justice Leah Ward Sears: You know, I can’t really answer that question. I move so fast and I’m always … I’m a person that’s always moving to the next thing, you know, I went on the court at 36. I left at 54. I’m doing this thing and after this, I may do another thing and then I’ll do another thing. So, I really am not the ... you know, occasionally I wake up. I mean, I remember there’ve been a couple of times when I’ve had some clarity about, wow, you’ve really, this is something else. But then it just pop, goes away. I have two young kids, they were very young when I went on the court, they could care less. My husband could care less. You know, he had to bring them along because I was a young mother at the same time that I was doing all of this. So they … you really couldn’t let it go too much to your head because you had to, you know, go to Kroger and get cupcakes for them, for, you know, all that kind of thing.

Lindsay Garbutt: How do you think ... I wanted to ask if your children have heard this poem and what they think of it, if so, or what you think they would think of it today?

Justice Leah Ward Sears: They have heard me recite it. Honestly, they don’t understand the pain or the suffering, or the ... it’s kind of like, oh, there’s mom again kind of type thing. You know what I mean? Just like my daughter doesn’t really under … my daughter’s now 33, my son is 36. You know, which is probably a good thing. They don’t understand sexism or racism, the way that I do or any of that, maybe that’s a good thing. You know, I took Brennan, my daughter, we went out before she got married last year, just so we can, I could like talk to her about things and I made this long list and that was the first time I thought she was actually listening to what I had to say because she married outside our race. And I wanted her to know that things are better, but they’re just not all cool. And her husband needed to understand that and the children that they were going to have needed to be steel to that. And she actually, I thought, for the first time was listening to me. So, you know, it’s a new world. I don’t want them to grow up with the same rage and hurt and upset that I had. They’ll probably have other rages and hurts and upset and that’s fine. Each generation has its own.

Lindsay Garbutt: Right. And it’s helpful to have the poems to sort of record that in the time being as a sort of history, but they may not always be read the exact same way each time.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Right. Exactly. They are just beginning to understand who I am as a woman versus who I am as their mother, but who I am as a woman and why I didn’t change my name, why I did the things that I did that they thought were just weird and embarrassing to them. All kinds of things.

Lindsay Garbutt: Do you have an example of something like that, if you don’t mind sharing?

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Well, I mean, I couldn’t make every kiddie party or an, or I don’t cook. Brennan, my daughter who lives very close by, was telling me the other day that she was asked to exchange family recipe with some group of women that she went to, she went to Spelman College and she said, you know, Mom, you don’t have a recipe you can give me, well, I do, I have a bit … I make a good Vidalia onion pie, but that’s about it.

Lindsay Garbutt: Nice.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Because I never had time to cook, or interest to be honest. Nothing wrong with it, but I just was doing other things. So, I mean just all kinds. She changed her name, which is perfectly fine. I did not, but I wanted her to understand why I did not, because at a certain point she was like, you made it so complicated. You know, she was poo-pooing it. And that was hurting my feelings. It was more like my freedom. It wasn’t about, uh, just to be weird.

Lindsay Garbutt: I think that’s, what’s ... it can be really hard in a poem to sort of capture the diversity of life experience or to capture the diversity of, as Margaret Walker was writing about, like a whole people,

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Yes.

Lindsay Garbutt: You know, and I think that’s what her poem does really well because it has this sort of refrain of for my people, but then each stanza is a different sort of list about what those people could be and what they represent and the varieties of experience.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Right.

Lindsay Garbutt: And we’ve sort of talked about the importance of lists, the fact that you went to your daughter with a list of things that you wanted to talk to her about. Like these are very important ways of keeping the memory and remembering things and also capturing something that’s really large and difficult to talk about.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Right.

Lindsay Garbutt: And I think on that note, I kind of wanted to end by going back to the ending of the poem, which you were talking about earlier and about how it’s a change from that sort of repetition of for my people; instead, she says, let a new world be born. And that whole stanza sort of focuses on that idea. Could you talk more about what that ending means to you?

Justice Leah Ward Sears: I mean, to me, this is—it’s all good, I mean, there is nothing in her poem that I don’t like. There were a few things I didn’t understand early on. Like dirge, what is a dirge and what, you know, I was looking around. But “Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a / bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second / generation full of courage, issue forth." I mean, this is where we are now, “let a people / loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of / healing”—healing, that’s what we need—“and a strength of final clinching be the pulsing / in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs / be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men”—and women—“now / rise and take control." I love it. And she didn’t have women, but if she had been born in this time, she would have, I know it.

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: I know it. So, I mean, that’s just as powerful. I mean, actually reading it, I have to choke up a little bit just to get through this. It’s as powerful this moment as it was when she wrote it.

Lindsay Garbutt: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Yeah.

Lindsay Garbutt: Is there something in particular that you’re hopeful about right now that might occur in this new world we’re trying to build?

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Nothing that would be good to say on this [LAUGHS].

Lindsay Garbutt: That’s fair. That’s fair.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: We do need a change. I mean, a lot’s got to change. We’ve got to get out of the … we’ve got to start being kind to one another. We have to start being neighbors, again. We have to care about each other, regardless of race or gender or sexual preference or all of this stuff. We just need to start taking care of each other once again.

Lindsay Garbutt: Justice Sears, thank you so much. This was such a wonderful opportunity to talk to you and I’m so glad to have met you and to have the knowledge that you’re working on these important issues in the world.

Justice Leah Ward Sears: Thank you, Lindsay. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

(READS POEM)

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
     repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
     and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
     unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
    gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
    hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
    dragging along never gaining never reaping never
    knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama
    backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
    and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking
    and playhouse and concert and store and hair and
    Miss Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn
    to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
    people who and the places where and the days when, in
    memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
    were black and poor and small and different and nobody
    cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to
    be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
    play and drink their wine and religion and success, to
    marry their playmates and bear children and then die
    of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox
    Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
    Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
    people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
    people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and
    land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time
     being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
     burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
     and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
     who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
     the dark of churches and schools and clubs
     and societies, associations and councils and committees and
     conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
     devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
     preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
     false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
    trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
    all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
    rise and take control.

Lindsay Garbutt: Justice Leah Ward Sears is an American jurist and former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia. 

You can read her essay, Love for My People, in the June 2020 issue of Poetry. You can also read Walker’s original poem in our archives online. It’s in the November 1937 issue of the magazine. 

Let us know what you thought of this program. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, or if you listen another way, email us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear your thoughts. 

The Poetry Magazine podcast is produced by Rachel James. The theme music comes from the Claudia Quintet. I’m Lindsay Garbutt. Thanks for listening