lived in Auburn, New York, where she became an
advocate of women’s rights. She died on March
10, 1913.
The Civil Rights Movement
‘‘Runagate Runagate’’ was published during the
civil rights movement. Many historians say that
the movement began in 1955 with a bus boycott in
Montgomery, Alabama, which was aimed at end-
ing discrimination against African Americans in
public transportation. Over the following ten
years the movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., had considerable success in ending
racial segregation in the South and ensuring that
African Americans had the right to vote. The Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of
1965 were both products of the civil rights move-
ment. In 1966, the civil rights movement entered a
new phase with the rise of the Black Power move-
ment, which did not share the nonviolent philos-
ophy espoused by King and his followers.
‘‘Runagate Runagate’’ is a potent reminder, as
AfricanAmericansstruggledtoobtainfullcivil
rights, of what their ancestors had suffered in their
attempts to escape slavery a hundred years earlier.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW‘‘Runagate Runagate’’ isregarded as one of Hay-
den’s most popular and successful poems. Fellow
African American poet Gwendolyn Brooks, in a
1966 review of Hayden’sSelected PoemsinNegro
Digest, refers to ‘‘Runagate Runagate’’ as a ‘‘well-
made and passionate’’ poem. In a 1971 review of
another volume of Hayden’s poems, Julius Lester,
in theNew York Times Book Review,refersto
‘‘Runagate Runagate’’ and Hayden’s poems ‘‘Mid-
dle Passage’’ and ‘‘Frederick Douglass’’ as ‘‘three
of the finest poems about the black experience in
the English language.’’ In a 1985 review of Hay-
den’sCollected Poemspublished in theNation,
Edward Hirsch notes that ‘‘Freedom is the great
subject of Hayden’s work’’ and that ‘‘Runagate
Runagate,’’ as well as other historical poems by
Hayden, succeed by their use of ‘‘the ironic juxta-
position of different voices,’’ which gives such
poems ‘‘an uncanny ethnographic basis, a pro-
found sense of the human suffering caused by
slavery.’’ In his essay inRobert Hayden: Essays
on the Poetry(2001), Critic Darwin T. Turner
also notes this technique ‘‘of developing a poem
through several speakers or voices rather than
through the one voice,’’ and suggests that Hayden’s
‘‘interest in drama caused him to create a poetry
dependent on several voices.’’ In creating such
poems, the reader ‘‘must distinguish the voices by
the subject, the diction, the language, or the tone.’’
Critic John Hatcher sees the poem in the context
of the other history poems inSelected Poems.
Noting Hayden’s strong religious faith (Hayden
was a member of the Baha’i World Faith),
Hatcher observes inFrom the Auroral Darkness:
The Life and Poetry of Robert Haydenthat ‘‘the
struggle of this one people [African Americans]
clearly symbolizes in Hayden’s poetry the aspira-
tion of all mankind.’’CRITICISMBryan Aubrey
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English. In the following
essay, he examines Hayden’srefusal to define himself
as a ‘‘black’’ poet and the ways in which ‘‘Runagate
Runagate’’ is not only a poem of the African Ameri-
can experience but also one with a universal meaning.
In many ways Robert Hayden’s ‘‘Runagate
Runagate’’ is a quintessential poem about the
African American historical experience. Not only
does it evoke the fierce struggle for freedom that
slaves in the South engaged in for so many years, it
at times uses a black regional language to tell the
story. It is by an African American poet who spent
many years, especially in the late 1930s and early
1940s, studying the history of the slave trade,
slavery in the United States, and the Underground
Railroad. Along with ‘‘Middle Passage,’’ a poem
about the rebellion on the slave shipAmistadin
1839, in which the black slaves took over the ship;
‘‘The Ballad of Nat Turner,’’ about the leader of a
revolt against slavery in Virginia in 1831; and
‘‘Frederick Douglass,’’ about the former slave
who became a noted abolitionist and statesman,
‘‘Runagate Runagate’’ is one of four historical
poems about the African American experience
that appeared in Hayden’s Selected Poems in- It might therefore come as a surprise to
discover that during the mid-1960s, Hayden was
challenged by other black poets and civil rights
activists for not being sufficiently ‘‘black’’ in the
way he perceived his poetic vocation.
How could such an unexpected situation
have come about? The answer lies in the history
of the1960s, one of the most turbulent decades in
recent American history. Few felt that turbulence
Runagate Runagate