Viewing A Kkk Uniform At The Civil Rights Institute Summary

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Response to Viewing a KKK Uniform At The Civil Rights Institute Ashley M. Jones is an excellent poet, her book Magic City Gospel is full of imagery and feeling. Most of the poems throughout give the audience a good impression of the pride she feels about Alabama and some of its culture. However, she also feels another type of way to some of the bad culture and history riddled and woven into Alabama’s core. One can feel her emotion as she speaks about a certain object inside of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. In Ms. Jones’s poem, “Viewing a KKK Uniform At The Civil Rights Institute”, she voices the haunting ghost of a feeling the uniform gives her. The title of her poem is ironic, Jones is visiting a civil rights museum but there is a KKK uniform there, set on display with its empty and dirty holes for eyes. One would think that while yes, the uniform is part of civil rights history, it would be one of the last things people would put on display at a civil rights museum. …show more content…

Through her word choices the audience can feel the sheer emotion filling into her as she stood in front of this old monster. In the poem Jones says, “Behind the glass, it seems frozen, waiting for summer night to melt it into action, for the clean white flame of God to awaken its limbs. In front of it, you are dwarfed” (lines 11-17). She speaks of this old white hood and sheet like it is a monster, sleeping, waiting for the opportune time to come alive and relive its sins. She Says, “for the clean white flame of God”, because of the history. The KKK thought they were holy men, torturing a people into submission. They thought they were clean and if you were black, by even a drop, you were unclean and