Volume 10 15
of gender. The list is as long as the people who will
make it.
That is why I find two of the most troubling
lines of this poem to be these: “Not all the jails
can hold these young black faces / From their des-
tiny of manhood.” Why did Madgett apparently
exclude herself and all other females from the
American Dream? Could a woman with a voice
this strong, a mind this keen, and a vision this clear
have been blind to the oppression of women?
Could a woman so closely identified with her peo-
ple that she used the pronoun “I” when referring
to her entire race be intentionally exclusive of any
of its members? Did she believe that civil rights
was the destiny of black men and was to be led by
black men? Was she careless? Was she a product
of a generation not yet concerned with women’s
rights?
I choose to believe that she was not. Instead,
I believe she understood that the fight for justice
demands a united army and a focused offensive
because it is a war, as all are, of life and death. I
believe that as she finished this poem, Madgett was
convinced that a later Alabama Centennial would
celebrate one hundred years of freedom for her
people; that as soon as she felt that freedom for
black males was secured, or at least securely on
the horizon, she would turn her attention to the
quest for women’s freedom; and that in her new
fight she would willingly raise her voice first and
loudest, providing the words that her sisters could
echo.
Source:Karen D. Thompson, in an essay for Poetry for Stu-
dents,Gale, 2001.
Sources
Randall, Dudley,The Black Poets,Bantam Books, 1971.
Giovanni, Nikki, Racism 101,William Morrow & Co., 1994.
Redding, Saunders, “Books Noted,” in Negro Digest,Sep-
tember, 1966, pp. 51-52.
Redmond, Eugene B., Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-
American Poetry,Anchor Press, 1976.
Sedlack, Robert P., Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol-
ume 76: Afro-American Writers, 1940–1955,edited by
Trudier Harris, Gale, 1988.
White, Deborah Gray, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in
Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994,W. W. Norton & Co.,
1999.For Further Study
Redmond, Eugene B., Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-
American Poetry,Anchor Press, 1976.
A chronicle of African-American literature, includ-
ing critical debates, a study of various African-Amer-
ican poets, background information, and a framework
for studying African-American poetry.
Smith, Valerie, et al, African American Writers: Profiles of
Their Lives and Works from the 1700s to the Present,
Macmillan, 1991.
A study of African-American writers and the themes
they explore in their work. An excellent resource
book.
Walker, Alice, In Search of our Mother’s Gardens,Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
From essays about black writers such as Zora Neale
Hurston and Jean Toomer to a tribute to Martin
Luther King and a retrospective on the Civil Rights
movement, this collection is a good companion to
any study of African-American literature.Alabama Centennial