Between the World and Me

“The Lynching” by Claude McKay (1922)

McKay was a prominent African American writer during the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote this sonnet in 1920 as a response to a rise in lynchings over the previous few years before its publication. In 1919, for example, there were 76 lynchings in the United States, the highest in a decade. In the sonnet, crowds come to view the corpse of the Black victim who was lynched the night before. No one, not even the women, shows any pity for him, and boys happily dance around the corpse. The poem differs from Wright’s “Between the World and Me” in that it adopts a religious perspective: The spirit of the victim has risen to heaven, having been called home by God, his father.

“Night, Death, Mississippi” by Robert Hayden (1962)

Hayden was one of the most prominent African American poets of the 20th century. In this poem, an old Ku Klux Klansman recalls the lynchings he participated in when he was younger and more mobile. He hears a cry in the night and thinks a lynching may be going on and wishes he could be part of it. He recalls the nights when he and his Klansmen friends wore white robes and went out to attack Black people.