Frederick Douglass

Robert Hayden was a career academic, a classroom philosopher who, unlike the more militant voices in his generation of Black artists, tended to take a broader view of history. History, for Hayden, was not defined by momentous tipping points, traumatic events that upended history itself and redirected its course by challenging its very logic. Hayden appreciated the processes of history, the longer and quieter evolution of metaphysics, and how history was defined not by challenges and confrontations but rather by the subtle interplay of forces and peoples that inched humanity toward a better world.

Influenced by his enthusiastic embrace of the Baha’i faith with its resplendent vision of humanity’s evolution to its ultimate spiritual oneness, Hayden here argues that history is the very vehicle of hope. He is no “fool.” He understood how in post-war America racism and segregation were not merely social realities but laws, institutionalized discrimination. But he argues that this could not, would not be the status quo.

The poem, however, does not advocate militant confrontation as a vehicle for necessary change. The poem finds in the soaring affirmation of the logic of inevitability a reason to hope. The ignorance of Jim Crow laws, the crude butchery of vigilante justice, the lack of opportunity in the Black community, the denial of education and economic rights to the Black family, the poem assures, cannot withstand the steady evolutionary energy of righteous and moral history itself.