6 Poetry for Students
don’t get weary.” The movement towards freedom
is also a movement towards adulthood. The tired
bones of the older generation of black Americans
who grew up in the earlier part of the twentieth cen-
tury are “revived,” in a way, by the eager, younger
generation not content to accept legalized discrim-
ination. She refers specifically to youth in the con-
cluding stanza: “Not all the jails can hold these
young black faces / From their destiny of man-
hood.” In this way, “Alabama Centennial” is very
forward-looking. Madgett focuses on what this next
generation will achieve.Style
“Alabama Centennial” is written in free verse. This
means that there is not an established meter or
rhyme, as in traditional poetic forms. It is proba-
bly fair to say that the content of this poem is what
determines its form. Given that the poem is about
breaking free from the binding forces of racism and
inequality, the language itself breaks from older,
traditionally European forms. This was not just
happening for writers writing of racial oppression;
a movement among American writers to break from
traditional structure had begun decades earlier. In
this case, though, the relationship between the idea
of free verse, and the subject of the poem, seems
clearly present.
If there is a formal consistency to the poem it
is the use of lists, places or events, that recur
throughout. This is heightened with the use of
anaphora, which is the repetition of a word or
phrase at the beginning of a line, and with the use
of parallelism, which is a rhetorical device that uses
similar phrasing to hold things together. A good ex-
ample is line 13, which reads “ ‘No,’ it said. ‘Not
‘never,’ not ‘later.’“ The repetition of the word
“not” not only binds the words, but creates a cer-
tain rhythm in the process.Historical Context
When Madgett refers to the American Dream “one
hundred years past due,” she is situating the
African-American struggle for civil rights in a cen-
tury-long struggle for equality and respect. Mad-
gett wrote “Alabama Centennial” in 1965—the
middle of a tumultuous and sometimes violent
decade. But it was also a decade of substantialprogress for civil rights movements, with people
such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Rosa
Parks ushering in winds of change.
This poem was written exactly one hundred
years after the Civil War ended and blacks were at
last freed from slavery. But the residues of slavery
would live long into the next century, spurred by
such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan and insti-
tutions such as black codes and Jim Crow laws.
The South remained highly segregated long af-
ter reconstruction. There was little progress in eas-
ing racial tensions through the end of the nineteenth
century and into the early twentieth century. In
Alabama in 1901, a new state constitution was
adopted, which had the effect of further disenfran-
chising black voters. In fact, total blacks registered
in 14 counties in Alabama fell from 78,311 in 1900
to 1,081 in 1903.
Segregation was a way of life in the South, and
in other regions of the country as well. Blacks and
whites attended separate schools, drank from dif-
ferent water fountains and had different bathrooms.
When riding the bus, blacks were forced to give up
seats on the front of the bus for white people and
had to move to the back of the bus. There were
“white only” lunch counters, restaurants, parks, and
theaters. The doctrine “separate but equal,” derived
from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was supposedly the
guiding force behind segregation, but things were
far from equal in terms of public facilities and dis-
tribution of wealth.
Things began to change in the 1950s and 60s
when blacks and sympathetic whites rose up in civil
protest. First, in 1954, the Supreme Court declared
that separate educational facilities were “inherently
unequal” in its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board
of Education Topeka, Kansas. Still, things were
slow to change until 1955, when Rosa Parks helped
to spark a movement when she refused to move to
the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her
act of defiance led to the Montgomery bus boycott,
which lasted a year and was nearly 100% success-
ful in ending segregation on the buses. The boycott
was the beginning of massive civil rights demon-
strations in Birmingham, Alabama (April 1963)
and Selma, Alabama (March 1965). The protests
consisted of nonviolent direct action—the philoso-
phy preached by Baptist minister and leader of the
movement Martin Luther King. Finally in 1964,
Congress passed the Civil rights Act. This piece of
legislation prohibited discrimination in employ-
ment and established the Equal Employment Op-
portunity Commission. This act also outlawedAlabama Centennial