"The awful sin remained still unforgiven."
Allusions to Christ are an important feature of anti-lynching poetry, and here McKay sets up the Christian context almost immediately. However, this crucial fourth line makes the connection to Christ most explicit precisely at the moment when the connection fails: here the "awful sin" is not forgiven. Emphasized formally with the slant rhyme on heaven/unforgiven, McKay shows that this allusion, if perhaps an appealing one, is itself a failure, for there is no purpose at all behind this victim's suffering. Moreover, the poem argues that not only the victim's but even Christ's own death will not redeem the lynchers: in a culture of systemic murder and oppression, original sin "still" has not—and indeed will not—be forgiven.
"The women thronged to look, but never a one / Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue."
These final lines of the third quatrain place a strong emphasis on visuality, not only with the description of women "throng[ing] to look" but with McKay actually delineating the women's response through a description of their "eyes." This visual emphasis shows how the crowds treat the lynching as a popular spectacle, one to which these "steely" women are emotionally indifferent. However, when McKay describes their emotions only in terms of a lack of feeling manifested externally, he also notably refuses to imbue these spectators with any interiority or emotional life, implying that not only do the women not feel sorrow on this occasion but that they actually can "never" feel remorse over racialized violence. If they have objectified and dehumanized their victim, McKay also indicates that they themselves are dehumanized in turn—unable to experience the proper emotional or spiritual life of a human being.
"And little lads, lynchers that were to be"
This penultimate line from McKay's poem highlights his theme of the continuity of racial violence, offering us not a vision of future progress and change but of a generation of children who will soon be lynchers themselves. When McKay writes of the "little lads, lynchers that were to be," his "l" alliteration inextricably ties the lads to their future as "lynchers," and the diction of “were to be” doubles down on “to be” verbs to imply that these children actually exist to be lynchers. This line and the closing one after it thus offer not any kind of "resolution"—as the final couplet in a sonnet will sometimes do—but only an ironic conclusion that suggests that America's perverse love of lynchings will continue unabated.
