Wikipedia links to elucidate some of the allusions . . .

. . . in Monday's Margaret Walker poems. Check it out:

Moloch
Amos
Selma
Birmingham

As you prepare for the midterm and look back at Countee Cullen's work, this may also be of use:

The Scottsboro Boys

Here's something that seems really important to me. As a teacher of American poetry, I'm always talking about Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman as the two parents of the poetic tradition that's really American (not just English people writing in the Western Hemisphere) and as the two mid-19th-century poets who foreshadow the coming of Modernism. I talk about Dickinson the modest poet, the poet of the domestic, the intellectually rigorous poet, the poet of complicated diction and complicated philosophical questioning; and I talk about Whitman the poet-as-public-figure, the poet of the nation, the progressive, labor-affirming, diversity-affirming poet, the poet of inclusion, of long, ragged lines, of anaphora.

Then I talk about Allen Ginsberg as Whitman's great inheritor, using the same long raggy lines, the same bombastic I-am-America tone, the same attention to the oppressed and overlooked, the same anaphora. In poems like "A Supermarket in California" he even explicitly sets himself up as Whitman's inheritor.

But I want to point this out: Allen Ginsberg leapt to poetic prominence with the publication of Howl in 1956. But the Whitmanesque poems we read by Margaret Walker and Richard Wright were published in the mid-'30s and early '40s! What that says to me is that Ginsberg is probably indebted to Wright and Walker as well as to Whitman. The Beats were famous as a group of white poets who intentionally aligned themselves with underground political and artistic movements, with jazz, with black artists. Ginsberg may possibly not have been reading Walker, but I'd bet money he read Wright. I can't articulate everything I want to say about this right now, but it does seem really important to me that Wright and Walker were channeling Whitman well before Ginsberg was.