The Lynching

McKay’s sonnet depicts the lynching of an innocent Black man at the hands of a white mob, but McKay chooses to describe the man’s death with euphemistic, religious phrasing. He shows the man’s spirit ascending to “high heaven” in “smoke” (Line 1) and acknowledges that God, the man’s “father” (Line 2), had “bidden him to his bosom once again” (Line 3). With this euphemistic description of death, McKay focuses on the ascension of the soul and the spiritual freedom created by death rather than the physical pain but, more importantly, also deliberately alludes to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ recorded in the Gospels. Like the man in “The Lynching,” the crucified Christ committed his spirit into his Father’s hands and “gave up the ghost” (King James Version, Luke 23.46), separating his body from his spirit as it ascended to heaven. Upon his execution, McKay’s central character is brought to the Father’s “bosom,” a place Christ is said to reside (John 1.18). Furthermore, Scripture often describes the moment Christ was nailed to the cross as his being “hanged from a tree” (Acts 5.30, 10.39), an expression of which McKay was undoubtedly aware. Thus, just as Christ was lifted up and hung from a tree, so too is McKay’s victim.

By drawing this comparison between the lynched Black man and the crucified Jesus Christ, McKay attacks the supposed Christianity of the man’s murderers and white Americans who justify or ignore this kind of racial violence. In the poem, he notes the women who “thronged to look” (Line 11) at the hanging body but never felt or “showed sorrow in [their] eyes of steely blue” (Line 12). Even at the horrific death of Christ, women came to watch and mourn (Matt. 27.55), but “never a one” (Line 11) mourned the lynched man’s unjust execution. McKay rebukes these supposed Christians for their “fiendish” or demonic “glee” (Line 14) at a scene that should remind them of the world’s greatest sin as well as their calling to compassion.