Martin Carter

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Martin Wylde Carter (June 7 1927-December 13 1997) was a Guyanese poet. Of mixed European, East Indian, and African descent, he began publishing in 1950 in Thunder (the organ of the People's Progressive Party and in A.J. Seymour's literary journal Kyk-over-Al.

His collection Poems of Resistance, published in 1954 by International Publishers in New York established his reputation as a powerful moral and political voice.

In the late 1950s he broke with the PPP and became active in the People's National Congress of Forbes Burnham, serving in PNC governments as minister of information from 1964 to 1970. In the late 1970s he was a supporter of the Working People's Alliance of Eusi Kwayana and Walter Rodney.

Long seen as primarily a poet who touched on themes of politics, resistance, and protest, his later poems were often highly personal. He is best known, however, for a powerful protest poem of the 1960s, "I come from the nigger yard of yesterday."

At the Live from Lincoln Center jazz concert for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, Danny Glover quoted some lines of Carter's, bringing him to public attention in North America for the first time in the twenty-first century.