Night, Death, Mississippi

“Gabriel” by Robert Hayden (1940)

An early Hayden poem that exposes the brutality of lynching and reflects his interest in the history of slavery, “Gabriel” relates the story of an African who leads a desperate and doomed revolt among slaves on a ship bound for America. Gabriel is hanged. Like “Night, Death, Mississippi,” Hayden uses a tight and conventional metrics to relay the horror that cannot be stopped. The poem, however, unlike “Night, Death, Mississippi,” focuses on the corpse itself, “black-gold in the sun,” compelling the reader to witness the implications of racism: a very dead body.

“Afterimages” by Audre Lorde (1997)

Written by a prolific poet known for strident works of social and political activism on behalf of minorities and women, the poem examines the lynching of Emmet Till in Mississippi in 1955, “a black boy hacked into a million lessons.” Like Hayden influenced by the formal experiments of Modernism, Lorde approaches the killing of the teenager from a variety of perspectives that capture the horror of the killing, detailed in appalling vividness, and the complicity of the white Southern townsfolk who never stopped the Klan, a situation very similar to Hayden’s.

“The Lynching” by Claude McKay (1922)