10 Poetry for Students

Madgett is borrowing from this rhetorical tradition

in the way she chronicles the events of the Civil

Rights movement. She speaks in first person: “And

I sat at the counters of Greensboro. / Ride! And I

rode the bus for freedom. / Kneel! And I went down

on my knees in prayer and faith. / March! And I’ll

march until the last chain falls / Singing, ‘We shall

overcome.’” Just as ex-slaves would recount their

experiences in slavery and their escapes, Madgett

is recounting the modern day movement towards

freedom, trying to inspire a mixture of emotions:

anger, hope, pride, and excitement, to name a few.

Madgett’s words act as a road map, locating

the physical presence of black people in places all

over the south: Montgomery, Greensboro, Bir-

mingham, Selma. These were all sites of protest

and revolution, marked with the sweat and tears of

Madgett’s people. These were also sites of white

resistance to the black struggle for civil rights—

police using fire hoses to spray the crowd, night-

sticks flying, churches burned, Ku Klux Klan

demonstrations. Leaders such as Martin Luther

King, Jr., were jailed as a result of demonstrations.

Madgett addresses this resistance in the final

stanza: “Not all the dogs and hoses in Birmingham

/ Nor all the clubs and guns in Selma / Can turn

this tide.” The movement, the desire for freedom

and opportunity, is stronger than the hatred and fear

of white America.

As a black woman, Madgett is speaking from

a doubly marginalized identity in 1960s American

culture. The contemporary women’s movement

gained momentum later than the civil rights move-

ment, picking up steam in the late 1960s and 1970s.

It is interesting to consider Madgett’s position in

these two movements. As an African-American,

she clearly identifies with the Civil Rights move-

ment. In the final stanza, she chooses an interest-

ing image to present: “Not all the jails can hold

these young black faces / From their destiny of

manhood.” One imagines Martin Luther King writ-

ing his famous letter from a jail cell in Birming-

ham, Alabama, as well as the scores of other black

men jailed. But the reader is left to wonder about

the destiny of womanhood. Historian and critic

Deborah Gray White, in Too Heavy a Load: Black

Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994,

commented: “The masculine ethos of the era was

certainly an impediment, but so was the Civil

Rights movement’s subsumption of gender and

class issues. The movement was at once a black

women’s movement, a black movement, and a

class-based movement, and it was not easy to de-

fine what was, and was not, a women’s issue.”

To throw gender into the mix complicates a

reading of “Alabama Centennial.” When historians

speak of the Civil Rights movement, sometimes the

male role in the movement is emphasized, with im-

passioned speeches from Martin Luther King.

There is no doubt that the male leaders of the move-

ment had tremendous impact in mobilizing an en-

tire culture to protest. But black feminism also

held—and still holds—great influence in the

African-American community. Madgett does not

outwardly identify with the burgeoning black fem-

inism of the 1960s, nor does she dismiss it. We can

only surmise that it is there as one of the many po-

litical forces shaping her work.

Certainly “Alabama Centennial” is a call to ac-

tion. Madgett carefully constructs the poem to

evoke both anger and empowerment. The anger and

Alabama Centennial

What

Do I Read

Next?

• Poet, playwright, and novelist Ntozake Shange
  is an important voice in contemporary African-
  American poetry. Her for colored girls who have
  considered suicide when the rainbow is enufis
  a long “choreopoem” that was also staged as a
  Broadway Play in 1976. Shange tackles issues
  such as racism, identity, and black womanhood
  in her poetry.


• Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison has written
  several novels and essays. Her first novel, The
  Bluest Eye,set in the 1940s, tells the story of an
  eleven-year-old girl trying to come to terms with
  her own blackness in a world obsessed with
  white standards of beauty. Morrison addresses
  the inner struggle that many African-American
  writers consider, including Madgett.


• Nikki Giovanni was first widely published in the
  1960s during the Civil Rights movement. The
  Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni(1996) is both
  personal and political. Giovanni is an important
  voice in African-American culture and her
  poems are very accessible.