Viewing a KKK Uniform at the Civil Rights Institute by Ashley M. Jones

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Viewing a KKK Uniform at the Civil Rights Institute is a poem reflected from Jones’ experience observing a KKK uniform at the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama. The way she delivered the poem delivering concrete and vivid detail of being so close to a uniform that symbolized and represented racism. She imagined the uniform taking one’s life of the energy who wore it, and the fear of the speaker becomes the fear of readers as they keep haunted by the uniform. In this poem, Jones depicts the traumatic history of racism in the past and how this affects Black people today.[1]

Poetry

Viewing a KKK Uniform at the Civil Rights Institute

Ashley Jones

All you can really tell at first

is that it was starched.

Some Betty Sue, Marge, Jane,

some proper girl

with a great black iron

made those corners sharp.

The hood, white and ablaze

with creases,

body flat and open

for husband, brother, son.

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—

you imagine a pair of pupils

behind the empty holes

of the mask.

Behind the stiff cotton,

would the eyes squint

to see through small white slits,

or would they open wide

as a burning house

to hunt you down

until you pooled

like old rope

before them? [2]

Author

Ashley M. Jones received an MFA from Florida International University, also known as the the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017), dark / / thing (Pleiades Press 2019), and REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021). Jones has received several awards for her poetry according to ashleymjonespoetry.com, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. And became a finalist, in 2020, for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Not to miss, her poems and essays appear at CNN, POETRY, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and more. [3]

From the interview with Jan Becker, Girls’ Club Writer in Residence, she talked about the Magic Cities of Birmingham, Alabama and Miami, Florida, the good spell of poetry, how words magically impact young people and the world, as well as the importance of history. [4]

Racism Issue

All you can really tell at first

is that it was starched.

Some Betty Sue, Marge, Jane,

some proper girl

with a great black iron

made those corners sharp.

In the first 6 lines of the poem showed that Jones wanted reader to reckon on the terror began and begins in domestic settings, among familiar faces.[5]

The way she insisted telling of how the KKK uniform impact as a symbol of racism and injustice, rather it is only fabric and stitches and starch, not a symbol. [6]

In a live interview with npr.org, Jones explained about the poem, Viewing a KKK Uniform at the Civil Rights Institute, to tell history of humans in different ways is part of her job as a poet. The history is a part of someone's identity. One of the incident is black chruch bombing in Alabama by KKK is one of the things that need to be remembered in order for it to not happen in th future.

"So I don't feel that my work with history is separate at all from my work as a poet or really just as a human being. I think that we all carry histories with us. There are so many histories that have made me possible. So I can't be from Alabama and not know and tell that story of George Wallace. I can't be a black woman and not tell the story of Sally Hemings. It's always with me all the time, and it makes me who I am. And as a poet, that's my job, to tell the story of humans. And so I have to, of course, have history in there all the time," she added, "I've heard that before, and that doesn't make sense to me because we have to remember what happened and what is happening in order for it not to happen anymore. And I'm a teacher, too, so of course I want us to learn and relearn and relearn forever. We can't leave history as history. It's part of the present as well."[7]

References