Those Winter Sundays (Historical Context)

Historical Context

At first, because of the personal nature of the poem’s central situation, there seems to be no sense in exploring the historical context of the time when it was published. It takes place within a household, between a father and son; the only real references to the world outside are that the father labored outdoors and that the son wore his good shoes on Sunday: these are circumstances that can be found in uncountable social situations throughout time. Robert Hayden’s work appears in anthologies of black writers, and he edited an important anthology of black writers, yet there is nothing specifically about the black experience in this poem. This distance from social situation is particularly notable when one considers that it was published in 1962, a period of increased activity in the African-American community, when the Civil Rights movement was at its height. Understanding the background that Hayden chose to avoid in writing this poem can help the reader understand the intensity of feeling that the poet is reaching for.

During the last half of the 1950s, the cause of civil rights for African Americans made substantial legal progress. Since the Civil War in the 1860s, southern states had maintained laws that had made it illegal for black citizens to make use of the same facilities as whites. There were, for example, separate railroad cars, restaurants, public drinking fountains, hotels, campgrounds, taxi cabs, etc. Exclusion of African Americans was legal because of a Supreme Court ruling in 1898 in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, which stated that it was legal to offer “separate but equal” accommodations for blacks. In practice throughout the first half of the 1900s, the “separate” part of this doctrine was strictly enforced, with blacks punished by law for using property designated for whites, while the “equal” part was openly ignored. Beside the punishment of the legal system, African-American citizens were intimidated by the violence of vigilante “goon squads,” such as the Ku Klux Klan, which seldom faced punishment for murdering, beating or destroying the property of non-whites. In the 1950s, though, the blatant inequality in the southern states came to national attention, and the federal government stood against state governments to protect the rights of blacks. In 1954 the Supreme Court overturned the 1898 decision and ruled that schools could never be equal if races were separate, and would therefore have to be desegregated; this judgement was eventual applied to all other forms of segregation. In 1955 Dr. Martin Luther King led a boycott against the transit system of Montgomery Alabama to protest separate seating arrangements on buses: the year-long protest was victorious, showing the power of black consumers. In 1957, federal troops were sent to Little Rock, Arkansas, to face state National Guard troops whom the governor had ordered to stand in front of a high school to keep black children out. That same year Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act since the 1870s.

These political and legal advances for blacks did not cure social inequality: by 1962, they had created a great deal more unrest than satisfaction, by putting racial injustice into the front of everyone’s minds. White segregationists felt threatened by African-American gains and became even more violent, while blacks became impatient as society moved at a crawl to enforce the rights that had been recognized. Many schools admitted blacks, but some, such as the University of Mississippi, were still sites of violent resistance, approved of by state governors. To ensure enforcement of a 1961 ruling that banned segregation on all interstate roads and connected rest stops, buses of black and white youths, called Freedom Riders, rode the South and were often met with violence. With the passage of time, the once-solid civil rights movement was splintered by the different ideas that were brought to it. Some groups wanted to meet violence with violence, while others felt that the non-violent techniques that had been used in the 1950s were most successful. Some leaders, including Dr. King, welcomed whites who were supportive of their cause, while others, like Malcom X, felt that the problems of blacks could only be understood by blacks. If the 1950s had given African Americans the idea that they could stand in support of their racial identity, by the 1960s different factions of the Civil Rights movement stressed that they should.

Robert Hayden often maintained that he wanted to be thought of as a poet, not a black poet. He was born in 1913, and was in school during the Harlem Renaissance, which was America’s greatest grouping of African-American literary figures. Although he had been able to see the Renaissance writers succeed as blacks in literature never had before, he also saw the praise they received as always for being “black” artists, as if they had been held to a lower standard. Hayden, like any African American, knew what it was like to feel conspicuous because of his skin, but some of that effect was muted by his reaching maturity during the 1930s, during the Depression, when people of all colors had employment troubles. In 1943, Hayden converted to the Baha’i religion, which holds as one of its basic principles the recognition of universal brotherhood, regardless of race or gender. He was an intellectual and a man of letters, who received grants from foundations and a solid, prominent position teaching literature at Fisk University, which had been established in 1875 as the nation’s first black university. He was interested in poetic form, not politics. In 1966, he came under attack when Fisk hosted its first Black Writers’ conference, where Hayden was openly jeered for writing about personal subjects and not the African-American experience. Having been hailed as a leading black artist in the 1950s and 1960s, Hayden found his attempts to transcend race mocked by his own people. Until his death in 1980 he resisted attempts by social groups to influence his subject matter.

Compare & Contrast

• 1962: Riots broke out on the campus of the University of Mississippi to prevent a black student, James Meredith, from enrolling. When the federal government forced the state government to stop blocking him, Meredith was admitted. For the first 10 months of his college career he had to attend classes under the guard of federal marshals.

  1995: A Supreme Court decision required the Citadel, a military school receiving federal funds, to admit its first female student, Shannon Faulkner. Within a month Faulkner dropped out, citing exhaustion from the exercise regimen.

• 1962: The first American astronaut orbited the Earth.

  1969: The first person, American astronaut Neil Armstrong, stepped onto the moon.

  1986: The space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, as the entire nation watched.

  Today: International teams of scientists perform experiments in space.

• 1962: The ABC network began broadcasting in color for three and a half hours per week.

  1967: All three American television networks were broadcasting all of their shows in color.

  1975: The first telecommunications satellite made cable television available across the country.

  Today: Almost 65 percent of American households have cable television; almost 80 percent of American households own videocassette players.