The second poem that I am going to look at is Incident. It was written by Countee Cullen. This poem is a very short and simple one. In it the author tells the reader about how when he was only eight years old and was riding through Baltimore and how he saw ‘a Baltimorean, keep looking straight at me’. Cullen then describes how he smiled at this Baltimorean which, to me, implies that he was only looking to make a new friend here when he was called ‘nigger’. This shows how he was innocent to the racial discrimination that was happening in the southern states of America during this time. In the last stanza Cullen says that although he was in Baltimore for six months, this ‘incident’ was the only thing that he could remember from his journeys. This gives me the impression that this was the first act of racial discrimination that he had encountered, which I believe scared him and so was all he could think about, hence it was all he could remember.
The final poem that I am going study is The Hurricane, which was written and sung by Bob Dylan. This poem is a true story which was written to commemorate the life of Rubin Carter and to make people aware of the terrible things which happened to him. Rubin Carter was a middleweight boxer who was number one contender for the middleweight title when he was wrongly accused of a triple murder and sentenced to life. The poem describes what happened in the bar in New Jersey which led to Rubin Carter being arrested. It then describes how ‘All of Rubin’s cards were marked in advance’, meaning that he was set up and that the trial was rigged and that he was bound to be set to prison. The way that the line ‘he could-a been, the champion of the world’ has been put in the poem several times makes you feel sorry for him even more than you would already, because it emphasises the fact that Carter had a great life. Throughout the poem Bob Dylan tells the reader/listener how racism caused Carter to be put in jail. He does this by putting in a line or two every now and again. An example of this is such as after he describes how Rubin was arrested after being pulled over when driving around town with some friends, ‘If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street, unless you wanna draw the heat’. By this he means that black people were always being blamed for crimes, often with little or no evidence. Another example is when he is acting out a conversation between the police and Arthur Dexter Bradley, where the police are trying to convince Bradley to testify against Carter, where the police officer says to Bradley, ‘Think it might have been that fighter you saw runnin’ that night, Don’t forget that you are white’. This means to say that the whites must stand together and fight against the black community.
In conclusion the three poems all explore racism in their culture in different ways, the Hurricane explores the way that blacks were treated unfairly in law and tries to convince the reader to feel sorry for the victim of the crime. In the Ballad of Birmingham the author looks at the way black Americans were targeted by terrorism and again tries to make the reader feel sorrow for the victims of the racial discrimination. In Incident, the author explores racism to black Americans by showing the innocence of a small black child whom was the victim of racial discrimination, although the discrimination did not lead to as serious results as in the other two poems, the poet keeps this poem simple to show that there was/is no reason for the discrimination however it happens all the same.