23 pages • 46 minutes read
Robert HaydenNight, Death, Mississippi
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1966A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
“Night, Death, Mississippi” reflects two literary traditions in mid-century America that influenced Robert Hayden: the impact of Modernism on the form and sound of poetry and the rise in interest, sparked by a movement in the 1920s in New York City known as the Harlem Renaissance, in Black identity, Black culture, and Black history in white America.
Raised in what were essentially the projects of Detroit, neighborhoods where Black people new to the North established enclaves of Southern Black culture, Hayden grew up aware of the transition of Black America into a strong and independent cultural voice. In high school, Hayden introduced himself to a wide range of poets from the Harlem Renaissance, most notably Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes. The poetry, which so often confronted the realities of white oppression and the struggle nevertheless to joyously assert Black identity despite/because of the heavy history of slavery, opened Hayden’s awareness to the long, troubled history of Black people. Under the aegis of the Federal Writers’ Project, Hayden explored further the historic documents of antebellum South and the legacy of African folk tales on the religion in the Black South. As part of the faculty of an historically Black university, Hayden followed the events that unfolded in the 1950s as a generation of young Black activists asserted their identity and their pride in their history and their culture and angrily (and often violently) rejected the power of white people to define their lives.
Fused to that awareness of his Black identity and his commitment to bringing Black issues into the mainstream of American poetry is Hayden’s indebtedness to Modernism, an avant-garde literary movement centered largely in Europe in which a generation of artists—writers, composers, painters, philosophers—upended any inherited literary forms in the compromising search to make art new. Under the influence of the iconic British Modernist W. H. Auden, under whom Hayden studied at the University of Michigan, Hayden brought to his poetry a daring sense of experimentation with the look and sound of poetry. Hence, “Night, Death, Mississippi” looks like traditional poetry but refuses to abide by tight and tidy expectations of meter and rhyme. In addition, the poem experiments with unreliable narration, in fact triangulated unreliable narration, casing the poem in the particular vernacular of three seemingly poorly educated rural Southern whites. Finally, the poem provides a kind of Greek chorus effect in the italicized lines between stanzas in the second part.
Historical Context
Determining with any exactness the time and the historical conditions under which any poem is drafted is at best haphazard guesswork (the gestation of a poem can be years). However, the publication date, 1962, can provide insight into the historical context that produced Hayden’s denunciation of Southern racism and the brutal history of the Klan’s century-long pogrom against Black people in the Deep South.
Although long a student of the history of Black identity in the South—Hayden published notable works on orator Frederick Douglass and on the horrific conditions on board slave ships, a commercial shipping voyage trek known as the Middle Passage—he followed the emerging conflict in the Deep South of his day with keen interest, although the increasingly confrontational rhetoric of both Black and white people alarmed Hayden most deeply because of the credo of the Baha’i faith, his adopted religion, which stressed the evolution of humanity toward a utopia of oneness and community.
By 1962 the battle for civil rights, focused most specifically on voting rights in the South, had been raging for close to a decade. The states in the Deep South—Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia—fought the federal attempts to dismantle segregation with especial vigor, citing the social and economic institutions forged by the toxic Jim Crow logic of separate but equal that had created and sustained Southern culture for generations. Of particular concern in the months during which Hayden worked on the poem were increasingly alarming reports that Freedom Fighters, young Black and white civil rights activists coming into the Deep South from the north to agitate for Black rights and to bring media attention to any expressions of white suppression of Black people, were being threatened, harassed, and even beaten by the Klan, long regarded in the North as extinct.
The media attention focused on the Freedom Fighters created national awareness of the continuing influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the efforts by Southern whites to intimidate those who sought to bring about real change to the South. The 1955 horrific beating death of Black teenager Emmett Till at the hands of the Klan during the boy’s visit with his family in rural Mississippi and his mother’s courageous decision to leave open the boy’s casket with his beaten and disfigured face to show America exactly what it meant to be beaten to death had done much to expose the reality of Klan violence. Given the poem’s focus on the violence of the Klan and how their hate can be passed generation to generation, Hayden exposes the Klan’s noxious and dangerous presence the best way he can: by letting Klan members speak for themselves.
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