Alabama Centennial (Criticism)

Criticism

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 enuf is 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.

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, Birmingham, 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 movement, 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 movement. In the final stanza, she chooses an interesting image to present: “Not all the jails can hold these young black faces / From their destiny of manhood.” One imagines Martin Luther King writing his famous letter from a jail cell in Birmingham, 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 define 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 impassioned speeches from Martin Luther King. There is no doubt that the male leaders of the movement had tremendous impact in mobilizing an entire 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 feminism of the 1960s, nor does she dismiss it. We can only surmise that it is there as one of the many political forces shaping her work.

Certainly “Alabama Centennial” is a call to action. Madgett carefully constructs the poem to evoke both anger and empowerment. The anger and desire for freedom and full rights of American citizenship is what fuels the fight for equality. The empowerment is the net result that comes from years of protest and struggles to reeducate American society — a struggle that still resonates.

Source: Judi Ketteler, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.

Paul Witcover

Paul Witcover is a novelist and editor in New York City with an M.A. in Creative Writing and Literature from The City University of New York. In the following essay, he discusses themes of racism and responsibility in Naomi Long Madgett’s poem, “Alabama Centennial.”

Naomi Long Madgett’s poem, “Alabama Centennial,” published in her 1965 collection Star by Star, is at once a stirring call to action and a moving record of psychological and social transformation. The poem works on a variety of levels to communicate its theme of the struggle for individual and collective emancipation. That struggle occurs within the confines of a culture of institutionalized racism that employs violence, fear, and habit to shape, consciously and unconsciously, every aspect of public life and private thought. Poems like this one, which rely upon a reader’s familiarity with political and historical events, and which seek to move that reader toward a particular point of view by appeals to reason, conscience, and emotion, fall into the category of didactic poetry.

The title of Madgett’s poem refers to a centennial, a word meaning the celebration of a one hundred anniversary. But what anniversary is referred to? Readers might naturally assume at first that it is the one hundred anniversary of Alabama’s statehood, but in fact Madgett has a very different anniversary in mind. It is no coincidence that “Alabama Centennial.” appeared in 1965, exactly one-hundred years after the end of the Civil War. That is the centennial to which Madgett’s ironic but also hopeful title refers.

What was the status of African-Americans in the United States 100 years after the defeat of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery? Despite Congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, African-American men and women in 1965 were still treated as second-class citizens throughout much of the country. The legacy of institutionalized racism persisted. That legacy includes Jim Crow laws adopted by states to deny their non-white citizens full participation in, and access to,

the government under which they lived, to which they paid taxes, and in whose armies they fought and died. The phrase “separate but equal” was the rallying cry used by those — like Alabama’s governor, George Wallace — determined to protect white privilege and power at all costs. While Alabama’s reputation as a bastion of racism made it a logical place for Madgett to set her poetic centennial, she is not writing about Alabama alone, but every state in the Union. When the reader recalls that the states of the Union are represented on the American flag by stars, the title of the collection in which “Alabama Centennial.” appears, Star by Star, takes on a new significance.

The Jim Crow laws, and the philosophy of “separate but equal” used to rationalize them, came under increasing attack from the 1950s. Many historians date the beginning of the modern Civil Rights movement to 1955-1956, when Rosa Parks’s brave refusal to give up her bus seat triggered the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, the event which catapulted a charismatic advocate of non-violent resistance, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., to national prominence.

1965 would prove to be a turning point for the Civil Rights movement, as Dr. King’s philosophy of non-violence was challenged by other African Americans impatient with the pace of change. In March of that year, Dr. King led more than 25,000 peaceful marchers into Montgomery, Alabama to press for passage of the Voting Rights Act. That triumphant march that serves as the occasion of Madgett’s poem. But it is worth remembering that while President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, racial tensions in the United States had grown so high by then that just five days later, on August 11, a routine traffic stop by white police officers in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts sparked one of the worst riots in American history.

This and subsequent events, such as the assassination of Dr. King in 1968 and the rioting that followed, cannot help but influence readers’ reactions to “Alabama Centennial.” Are readers wrong to bring knowledge unavailable to Madgett into their experience of her poem? Surely not. If a poem is to be more than a lifeless artifact entombed in language, it must grow and change with the wider world. At the same time, readers have a responsibility to remain rooted as much as possible in the language, rhythms, and images of the poem itself before looking beyond them.

Robert Sedlack, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, states that the narrator of “Alabama Centennial” “assumes the collective voice of [civil rights] protestors.” There is a progression from the “I” of the poem’s first line — repeated no less than six times in the following lines — to the “we” of line 28. Not only that, but the poet almost immediately lets her readers know that the “I” is not just a single person; after all, it is unlikely that one individual could wait “for a hundred years” and in such a wide variety of places as those featured in lines 3-7. Just as the State of Alabama in the poem’s title stands for both itself and all 50 states, so, too, does the “I” stand for both an individual person and a multitude of people. This is a common poetic device known as synecdoche: that is, the use of a part to mean the whole.

The poem opens with a simple sentence: “They said, ‘Wait.’” But nothing in this poem is as simple as it appears. Who exactly are “they”? The first stanza continues in a list that includes cotton fields, chain gangs, “stinking ‘colored’ toilets” and the “outside of schools and voting booths.” Each of these items powerfully evokes the narrow opportunities available to, and the humiliations and brutalities inflicted upon, generations of African Americans under the Jim Crow laws. The narrator speaks of waiting in these places, but for what? The answer isn’t stated explicitly until the third stanza, line 17, where the word “freedom” appears. But even in the first stanza that answer is already clear, partly because of the poem’s title and the historical ironies and associations embedded therein, and partly because of the list of places carefully selected by the poet to elicit specific reactions in her audience. The reader might therefore decide that “they,” the ones who tell the narrator to wait, are white people, especially when the stanza goes on to conclude with the lines: “And some said, ‘Later.’ / And some said, ‘Never!’”

The narrator is indeed referring to white people. But not only whites. The ambiguity of the words “they” and “some” allows the poet to cast a wider net. Madgett has no interest in reducing the problems of segregation and racism to a black versus white, good versus evil, dichotomy. The reality she perceives is too complex for that.

The second stanza introduces “a new voice.” This voice answers the voices of the first stanza. “‘No,’ it said. ‘Not “never,” not “later,” / Not even “soon.” / Now. / Walk!’” The poem moves from the passivity of waiting to the action of walking: the peaceful protest marches that were among the most visible and successful tools of the civil rights movement. The reader would not be wrong to identify this “new voice” with that of Dr. King, and in fact, the sermon-like rhythms and even the language and images of the entire poem closely parallel Dr. King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech from 1963. But again, because the owner of the voice is never explicitly identified, it seems to issue from a multitude of throats in a force as fresh and pervasive as the wind with which it is compared: “Strong, determined, sure.”

In the third stanza, other voices join in to echo “the freedom words.” Up until now, all the voices in the poem have “said” their words. But suddenly the words are whispered, sung, prayed, and shouted. The explosive variety of verbs, contrasted with the flat repetition of “said,” expresses the mounting passion and determination of those who walk “the streets of Montgomery.” This stanza is the heart of the poem structurally; two stanzas precede it and two stanzas follow. It is also the heart of the poem in a figurative sense, the turning point where a dramatic change takes place. That change occurs in the final line of the stanza: “Until a link in the chain of patient acquiescence broke.”

It is worth looking at this line closely, for it is the well-oiled hinge upon which the poem, like a hidden door, swings smoothly and unexpectedly open. The words “link” and “chain” suggest the bonds of slavery which have continued to shackle the supposedly free descendants of slaves even after a hundred years. But the chain the narrator refers to is one of “patient acquiescence.” This is no iron chain imposed by force or trickery upon African Americans, nor is it even the more subtle but equally restrictive chain of oppressive laws. It is hard to see how those chains could be characterized as patient or acquiescent. No, this chain is an inner chain forged by fear and habit within the soul of the narrator, who, it should not be forgotten, speaks for multitudes. Freedom does not lie simply in breaking the chains imposed by racist white society. Those chains must certainly be broken, but the poet suggests more is necessary. Note that it is not enough to walk. Walking is only the beginning. The narrator walks until a link in the chain of patient acquiescence breaks. The narrator is that link. The chain is made up of many links, each an individual African American who must, like the narrator, decide to patiently acquiesce no more. In other words, the poet is stating that African Americans must wake to their own complicity in the racist status quo. Suddenly, with a shock, the reader realizes that the “they” of the first stanza is not made up of whites alone, but of African Americans as well. It is difficult to convey the hostility this message would have generated in the increasingly militant atmosphere of the civil rights movement of the mid-1960s. Indeed, it remains a controversial opinion nearly half a century later.

Once this inner awakening or liberation has occurred, real transformation of self and society can take place. This is what happens in the fourth and fifth stanzas. The “new voice” from the second stanza returns, demanding more of its listeners than mere walking. “Sit down!” it exhorts. “Ride!” “Kneel!” “March!” Each of these sharp commands evokes a protest tactic of the civil rights movement, from lunch counter sit-ins to freedom rider voter registration drives. The “I” of the poem, both individual and collective, vows to “march until the last chain falls.” And now the chain refers to both the inner chain of patient acquiescence and the outer chain of racist society. This is a process that, once started, cannot be stopped. “Not all the jails can hold these young black faces / From their destiny of manhood, / Of equality, of dignity, / Of the American Dream / A hundred years past due. / Now!”

There are three things to note about these closing lines. First, the freedom the narrator claims for the “young black faces” is to be found within the American system of government, not outside it. Unlike such groups as the Black Panthers, the narrator does not wish to escape or overthrow the American Dream but rather to join in. Second, while the poem begins with the word “wait,” it ends with “Now!” A transformation has taken place in the all-important line 22, an individual awakening of political and social awareness that prompts a change of stance from passive acceptance to active engagement. Third, in a sharp historical irony, women are missing from the narrator’s call for freedom, equality, and dignity. The destiny the narrator refers to is one of “manhood.” This omission is a kind of blind spot, reflecting the reality of 1965, when the women’s liberation movement, itself inspired by the civil rights struggle, had yet to emerge as a powerful force in its own right. So it is that even as the poem’s triumphant last word rings in the reader’s mind like the peal of a bell stirring a sleepy countryside to action, the echo of that bell down the years is somewhat attenuated and flattened due to the interpolation of events, of history, between “Alabama Centennial” as Madgett wrote it and the poem’s contemporary reader.

Source: Paul Witcover, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.

Karen D. Thompson

In this essay, Thompson discusses how Madgett’s diction and structuring of “Alabama Centennial” contribute not only to the poem’s pace, but also to its irony.

A title like “Alabama Centennial” conjures images of a parade winding its way down Main Street featuring the high school marching band; little children run out into the street, while parents caution them, and pick bright disks of candy from the hot asphalt where clowns riding ridiculously small tri-cycles have thrown it. Festive picnickers sate their holiday appetites with weightless biscuits that threaten to float away if they’re not held onto, cold fried chicken that’s still crispy and smells of grease, and peach cobbler heavy enough to bend a foil baking pan held by the edges.

This is a realistic picture of an Alabama Centennial, is it not? Centennial, after all, means celebration.

No.

Centennial connotes, but does not denote celebration. It means simply a period of one hundred years, or the marking of one hundred years. In Madgett’s poem, the word “centennial,” far from suggesting a celebration, evokes serious and sad retrospection. For in “Alabama Centennial” Madgett bemoans a hundred years of the failure of the United States to deliver the justice promised by the Civil War, and she mourns the tragedy of lost lives and the degradation endured in the charade of “separate but equal” living conditions.

The decade of the 1960s could have been a time for celebration. The United States could have seized upon the opportunity to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the end of the Civil War and the Constitutional amendment that ended slavery. Instead the hundred years after the end of the Civil War was marked, or marred, by Jim Crow Laws and violence.

Naomi Madgett’s choice of the word “centennial,” with its celebratory connotation, as her poem’s title presents a paradox. This paradox forces readers to identify her meaning and to scrutinize a poem they may otherwise skim because they’ve heard the story many times. Madgett continues to employ incongruity in the poem’s message. This is a poem about a movement: in this case, the Civil Rights movement. The very word “movement” presents a paradox. Movement is not limited to a single direction, is often incremental rather than continuous, and is often deceptive. Likewise, the hundred-year pursuit of freedom from color prejudice moves forward as well as backward, and it also stops. Additionally, movement toward justice is deceptive. It cannot be seen as it happens, but only as one looks back at a landmark and measures the distance traveled.

So it is with movement, or change, in society. Madgett mimics society’s erratic and sometimes imperceptible pace of change in this poem. Because it is free verse, the poem does not conform to a standard meter, which is one of the ways in which a poet achieves movement in a poem. The poem’s free verse form contains no intentional rhyme. If Madgett had used end rhyme, her readers would have moved quickly through the poem, perhaps pausing momentarily at the end of a couplet or quatrain, but then hurrying on toward the completion of the next rhyme. Perhaps the strongest sense of movement in poetry is accomplished with internal rhyme, a device which Madgett used along with end rhyme to great effect in her poem “Midway”: “I’m coming and I’m going / And I’m stretching and I’m growing / And I’ll reap what I’ve been sowing or my skin’s not black.”

“Alabama Centennial” is devoid of rhyme and rhythm, and perhaps intentionally so. This poem moves as justice moves: with stops and starts, fits and jerks. Its appearance on the page is jagged and irregular with lines of varying length, many of which are interrupted with punctuation marks. The lack of regular pace is fitting. When the word pace is applied to a liberation movement, an oxymoron is created. A liberation movement has no real pace, only a perceived pace, which for the oppressed is always too slow, for the oppressors is unacceptable, and for the fearful fringes is too fast.

While it lacks recognizable pace, the poem manages to elicit a feeling of urgency. However, this is not the result of standard poetic devices, but the result of punctuation and sentence length. The exclamations — “Never!” and “Walk!” and “Now!” are shouts of urgency. They are also, as single-word utterances, indicative of commands that demand immediate response. The use of these commands and the actions they elicit produce more than a feeling of exigency, they also contribute to the poem’s underlying irony. In line 10 “a new wind blew, and a new voice / rode its wings with quiet urgency.” Only after a single voice called out for freedom did other voices join the cry, and they joined as echoes. This image presents a sad irony.

The tragic legacy of the oppressed is that they are often so scarred by captivity that they evolve into a group without a voice, and sometimes without a vision. When a strong voice does rise, as one did with Reverend King, the voices of the oppressed masses, when they finally join in, are raised as echoes — almost as involuntary responses. The voices that joined the Civil Rights movement joined, it seems in this poem, in response to orders, as their ancestors had done for centuries. “Walk!” the voice said, “And I walked the streets of Montgomery,” and later, “Ride! And I rode the bus for freedom.” This is in truth sad irony, for one hundred years after the Civil War no black person should have been testing the waters of freedom for the first time. No black person should have still been waiting for an order to exercise an inalienable right. Fortunately, as was the case with Dr. King, directives sometimes issue from a beneficent source, and following them allows the dependent to move toward independence. Yet oppression persists. It persists for persons of color, persons of creed, persons of sexuality, persons of age, persons 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 destiny 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 people 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 Students, Gale, 2001.

“Madgett has a deep appreciation for language, whether she is using it to raise her voice in political protest, or to celebrate the beauty of morning dew on a rose.”