The Hey Black Child Poem by Useni Perkins

"Hey Black Child" is a short poem of affirmation by the Chicago poet, playwright and youth worker Useni Eugene Perkins, written in 1975 as the closing song of his children's musical Black Fairy. It asks Black children, again and again, whether they know who they are and what they can become, and then answers for them: yes, you can.

If you've heard it recited by a small child with a big voice, you know how it lands. We've all needed someone, at some point, to look at us and say out loud that we're capable of more than the world expects. This poem does exactly that, and it has done it for half a century.

So let's look at where it really came from, who wrote it, why it's so often credited to the wrong poet, and how to share it well.

Who wrote "Hey Black Child"?

Useni Eugene Perkins wrote it. He was born in Chicago on 13 September 1932 and died there on 7 May 2023, aged 90. His father, Marion Perkins, was a sculptor who made sure his son grew up around art, and once took him to see Paul Robeson play Othello.

Perkins spent his working life with young people. For nearly twenty years, from 1966, he led the Better Boys Foundation Family Center in Chicago, and he later served on city and state task forces on youth. He was also part of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), the Chicago wing of the Black Arts Movement, and wrote poetry, plays and nonfiction, including Home Is a Dirty Street: The Social Oppression of Black Children.

That mix matters. "Hey Black Child" wasn't written from a distance. It came from someone who spent his days with the children it addresses, and who saw them, in the words of Chicago's Third World Press when he died, as "tomorrow's promise."

Where the poem came from

Black Fairy is a fairy tale, though not a traditional one. Perkins described it as the story of a Black boy with low self-esteem who hasn't yet learned to value his heritage and culture. During the final stages of production, the director of Chicago's La Mont Zeno Theatre, Pemon Rami, said the show needed a closing song. Perkins wrote "Hey Black Child," with music by Tony Llorens.

The play had more than a dozen original songs, but this was the one children carried home. They began reciting it on their own, and some Chicago schools had pupils say it every morning before class.

Here's how it opens:

Hey Black Child
Do you know who you are
Who you really are

Useni Eugene Perkins, "Hey Black Child" (1975). The complete poem is published in the picture book Hey Black Child, illustrated by Bryan Collier (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2017).

The real history behind it

You'll sometimes read that this poem belongs to the Harlem Renaissance, or to an era when Black Americans had no rights at all. Neither is quite right, and the real story is more useful.

Perkins wrote the poem in 1975, about a decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public places such as schools, libraries and restaurants, and banned discrimination in employment. The law had changed. Daily life for many Black children in cities like Chicago hadn't caught up. Perkins wrote about that gap in his nonfiction, drawing on years of work with children in low-income neighbourhoods.

The poem also belongs to the Black Arts Movement, which grew out of the civil rights and Black Power movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Artists in that movement wanted work made by Black people, for Black communities, that celebrated Black identity on its own terms. A song for children that says "you are strong, you can learn, you can lead" fits that mission exactly.

So "Hey Black Child" answers a specific moment, when new rights were on paper and children still needed to hear, every single morning, that those rights were meant for them.

Why it's so often credited to Maya Angelou

For decades, many people believed this poem was by Maya Angelou or Countee Cullen. Viral videos still carry those names. The mix-up has a simple cause. In 1980 Perkins's brother, Toussaint Perkins, produced a poster of the poem that was widely shared, but it carried only the name "Useni." With no surname, people filled in the most famous Black poets they knew.

Perkins was gracious about it, and also clear. He pointed out that Cullen, a Harlem Renaissance poet, wrote in a style shaped by the English Romantics, and that Angelou wrote in free verse and didn't write poems for children. "Hey Black Child" is neither. It's a chant, made to be said aloud by a classroom.

The record was finally set straight when Little, Brown published the picture book in 2017. If you share the poem today, credit Useni Eugene Perkins by name. It's a small act, and it's exactly the kind of respect the poem is about.

How the poem works

Perkins builds the whole poem from questions. Do you know who you are? Where you're going? That you're strong? Each stanza opens with the same call, "Hey Black Child," like a teacher getting a child's attention, then asks something the child may never have been asked.

Then comes the repetition: be, learn, do, said over and over in slightly shifting patterns. On the page it looks simple. Out loud it becomes a rhythm small children can memorise in a week, and that's the point. A belief you've chanted every morning for a year starts to feel like your own.

Notice the balance, too. The poem doesn't promise children they can be anything at all. It ties wanting to trying, and possibility to effort. And in its final turn, it widens from the single child to the future of the whole nation. Personal confidence and collective hope, in one breath.

How to share it with a child today

This poem was made to be spoken, so let's use it that way.

• Read the picture book together. Bryan Collier's collage and watercolour pages follow four children who grow up to be an artist, a dancer, a political leader and a scientist. Pause on each page and ask the child what they'd like to be.
• Make it a morning ritual. Chicago schools did it for years. Try it at breakfast or in the car for a week and watch what it does to the start of the day.
• Swap the questions. After reading, ask the child the poem's question in your own words: "Do you know how strong you are?" Then let them answer.
• Credit the poet out loud. Tell children who wrote it and where. Knowing that a real man from Chicago wrote this for kids like them is part of the gift.

You can also watch the much-loved video of three-year-old Pe'Tehn Raighn-Kem reciting the poem. Its title still credits Maya Angelou, which tells you how far the misattribution travelled.

Where to read the full poem

The poem is still in copyright, so we've quoted only its opening here. You'll find the complete text in Hey Black Child by Useni Eugene Perkins, illustrated by Bryan Collier, from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, in hardcover, board book, ebook and audiobook. For Perkins's own account of how he wrote it, read his interview with School Library Journal.

Somewhere today, a child needs to hear that they're strong, and that the future is theirs to shape. You might be the one who tells them. Go on, ask them the question.