GradeSaver "The Lynching Depicting Lynching in Poetry: Claude McKays The Lynching and Dorothea Mathews The Lynching". Print. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. In his poem The Lynching, Claude McKay uses the event of a black man being lynched to highlight the racism and gruesome acts of violence committed against blacks in America during the early twentieth century. When Billie appeared in Time, that gave her such prestige, Barney Josephson recalls in his book Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People. The title announces the event described in the poem: the lynching of a black man, already burned to a char by an angry mob. In The Way Ahead, one of the characters recites the dramatic monologue The Lynching of Black Maguire. community McKay says in the fourth line the awful sin remained still unforgiven as another Biblical allusion, but also as a paradoxical statement.