Between the World and Me

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1935

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Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

“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. He remembers one such incident in which they castrated the victim, and they would also beat the victims with chains. The Klansman thinks this was better than hunting bears.

“The Haunted Oak” by Laurence Dunbar (1900)

Dunbar (1872-1906), the son of two formerly enslaved individuals in Kentucky, was one of the first influential Black poets in the United States. This poem is in ballad form and is mostly narrated by a bough of an oak tree from which a Black man was hanged by a group of white men. The man had been accused of a crime and jailed, but the lynching party tricked the jailer into letting them take the man with them. After the atrocity, the leaves on the bough of the oak tree withered and fell, and the bough will never bear leaves again. The townspeople regard it as haunted for that reason. The story was told to Dunbar by an old Black man, who said it was about the lynching of his nephew in Alabama.

Further Literary Resources

Richard Wright: The Life and Times by Hazel Rowley (2008)

This biography of Wright was well received by reviewers. Rowley points out that in his twenties as a writer of poems and short stories, Wright returned repeatedly to “the horror of lynching.” In addition to “Between the World and Me,” Rowley claims that the stories in Uncle Tom’s Children “are still today the most gut-wrenching stories of lynch violence in American literature” (13).

“History of Lynching in America” by the NAACP (2024)

This is a survey of how lynching was used to “terrorize and control” Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries and how the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has worked over the years to end it. The article describes some notorious examples, such as the lynching in Mississippi in 1955 of a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till, who was accused of offending a white woman in a grocery store. It also includes some modern examples, such as the 1998 killing in Texas of James Byrd, a Black man, who was chained to a car by three white men and dragged through the streets.

The World of Richard Wright by Michel Fabre (1985, reprinted 2007)

This is a collection of 12 essays on all aspects of Wright’s life and work. Wright’s poetry has not received a great deal of critical attention, so Fabre’s essay, “From Revolutionary Poetry to Haiku” is important. It examines Wright’s poetry from the early poems (like “Between the World and Me”) that were published in radical magazines to his later blues poems such as “Red Clay Blues” and “Joe Louis Blues”; the latter was sung by the renowned Paul Robeson and recorded by the Count Basie orchestra. Fabre concludes his essay with a study of the Japanese haiku poems that Wright wrote later in his career.