Volume 10 5

held “in bread lines, at back doors, on chain gangs
/ In stinking ‘colored’ toilets / And crowded ghet-
tos, / Outside of schools and voting booths.”

Economically disenfranchised during and af-
ter slavery, African-Americans were denied access
into the places of society where the American
Dream resides. But Madgett’s message in “Al-
abama Centennial” is one of hope. Her generation
is reclaiming that lost dream through protest. Civil
disobedience was first enumerated in this country
by transcendentalist essayist Henry David Thoreau.
A few generations later, India’s Mahatma Gandhi
shaped civil disobedience into a fight for Indian in-
dependence from British rule. Then in the 1950s
and 60s, the torch was passed to Martin Luther
King. The Civil Rights Movement took as its foun-
dation the principals of civil disobedience. In this
way, black Americans were claiming their right to
the American dream by practicing one of the most
fundamental rights guaranteed by the Bill of
Rights: civil protest. Madgett speaks of her people
“riding,” “marching,” and “kneeling” for freedom
in protests throughout the South. In this way, they
claim the American Dream, as she says, “A hun-
dred years past due.”

Justice and Injustice

Madgett’s “Alabama Centennial” takes as its
premise that the past hundred years, and two hun-
dred or so years before that were filled with injus-
tice. She never mentions the word “slavery”—
instead she conjures it up through potent images:
“cotton fields, kitchens balconies.” She envisions
history as a struggle between the weight of justice
and drag of injustice. In the poem, that struggle is
initially represented through contrasting voices:
“they,” vs. “I,” and eventually “we.” “They” rep-
resents the negative forces of white America, with
extremist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and in-
stitutions such as Jim Crow laws. Madgett’s single
“I” is joined by the larger “we” to fight these in-
justices, and that “we” voice grows stronger
throughout the poem, culminating with the song
“We shall overcome” in the next-to-last stanza.

Madgett’s vision of history is dynamic, with
forces of injustice and justice always fighting each
other. For every “never” white America sends
down, the collective “we” speaker responds with a
“no,” “not never,” “not later.” There is movement
and energy. To fight injustice, black Americans sit-
in at lunchcounters, boycott buses, and march
peacefully while chanting. Fighting injustice is
marked in a physical way, with blood and sweat

and bodies placed in jail. Madgett also speaks of

the movement as having a life of its own: “Not all

the dogs and horses in Birmingham / ... Can turn

this tide.”

Rites of Passage

Madgett doesn’t speak of rites of passage in an

overt way in “Alabama Centennial”; rather, it is

implied. The topic of her poem—the Civil Rights

Movement—was in many ways a youth movement,

with groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coor-

dinating Committee training hundreds of student

civil rights workers on college campuses. In gen-

eral, people speak of the decade of the sixties as a

time of youth revolution.

While the collective “we” of the poem is meant

to cut across the age divide, in many ways, Mad-

gett is recounting a coming of age of an entire gen-

eration in lines such as, “Walk together, children,

Alabama Centennial

Topics for

Further

Study

• Consider a social injustice that you think should
  be corrected and write a poem about how you
  think society could go about conquering it, cen-
  tering your energies around specific exclama-
  tions, as this author does with “Walk!” “Ride!”
  “Kneel!” “March!” and “Now!”


• Langston Hughes’s “Dreams” also addresses the
  problem of living with racial segregation in
  America, but his poem is much quieter, more
  understated. Which poem do you think would
  be more successful in affecting its readers? What
  does the fact that Hughes’s poem is structured
  like blues music and Madgett’s has no formal
  structure tell you about the point that each au-
  thor is trying to make?


• This poem was published in 1965, at the height
  of the civil rights movement in America. Ex-
  plain the author’s use of the towns Mont-
  gomery, Greensboro, Birmingham, and Selma.
  What happened in these places? Is it a good idea
  for an author to refer to specific historical
  events, or does their meaning fade with time?