http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/tolson/tolson.htm
Modernist poet Melvin B. Tolson looks back through the history of black people in white America as a means expressing his artistic vision, then couches it in the structure of the European aesthetic. His empowering "Dark Symphony" uses the structure of the movements of an orchestral symphony to delineate the historical experience of black Americans. He uses the tools of the West African griot, parallelism, repetition and an implied call-and-response, in the service of recalling "the history of the people." In particular, the section labeled Lento Grave (from the Italian, meaning "slowly and solemnly") acknowledges the music and the makers of the spirituals:
The centuries-old pathos in our voices
Saddens the great white world
And the wizardry of our dusky rhythms
Conjures up shadow-shapes of ante-bellum years:
Black slaves singing OneMoreRiver to Cross
In the torture tombs of slave-ships,
Black slaves singing Steal Away to Jesus
In jungle swamps
Black slaves singing The Crucifixion
In slave-pens at midnight,
Black slaves singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
In cabins of death,
Black slaves singing Go Down, Moses
In the canebrakes of the Southern Pharaohs."
Tolson excavates the artifacts of slavery, and finds meaning, understanding, and connection in the lives of those who went before. Tolson's poem is Sankofa; it is also the genealogy and praise-song of the griot.