23 pages 46 minutes read

Night, Death, Mississippi

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1966

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Summary and Study Guide

Overview

Published in 1962 when America was confronting the implications of the bloody street birth of the African American civil rights movement, Robert Hayden’s stark “Night, Death, Mississippi” relates the disturbing narrative of a rural Southern white family the night a white-robed Klan mob beats with heavy chains a number of innocent Black men. Hayden, himself Black and at the time one of the most respected poets of his generation, known for continuing the dense formal experiments of the early century’s Modernist movement, relates the harrowing story through the shifting perspectives of a Southern farmer who regrets now being too old and too sick to be part of the Klan’s night, his son who returns from the attack invigorated, and his wife who worries more about how to clean their son’s bloodied shirt than about what the Klan, and their son, have done. The old man considers his son’s participation in the killing of the Black men a rite of passage to be celebrated.

The poem, thus, does not only decry the brutal racism of the mid-century South but looks into the psychology of bigotry and how one generation passes that hate to the next. Unlike other African American poetry written during the battle for civil rights, Hayden’s poem does not deal in angry, incendiary blurred text
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