Lucy Terry Prince Composes 'Bars Fight,' First Poem by a Black American

Lucy Terry Prince, an enslaved woman in Deerfield, Massachusetts, composes 'Bars Fight,' a ballad recounting a 1746 Abenaki raid. Preserved orally for over a century before print publication in 1855, it is the earliest known poem by a Black American. Her vivid, metrically precise verse demonstrates extraordinary literary talent despite her enslavement.