White men’s children spread over the earth— A rainbow suspending the drawn swords of birth, Uniting and blending the races in one The world man—cosmopolite—everyman’s son!
He channels the stream of the red blood and blue, Behold him! A Triton—the peer of the two; Unriddle this riddle of “outside in” White men’s children in black men’s skin.
Where this text comes from
First published in The New Negro (1925), ed. Alain Locke. This date is uncertain. Located in the scan on disk, printed under this title on page 147 in the “Negro Youth Speaks” section and signed “—Georgia Douglas Johnson.”; all eight lines agree with the corpus text. This is not the first printing: the anthology’s own acknowledgements read “Opportunity: … Riddle by Georgia D. Johnson”. The Opportunity issue has not been located, so the year here is the anthology’s and may be a year too late. [1] [2]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.
Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/georgia-douglas-johnson_poetry, poetry.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (13)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L8.
Cite this poem
Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880?–1966).
“The Riddle.” First published in The New Negro (1925), ed. Alain Locke.
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/georgia-douglas-johnson/the-riddle/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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