Objectification (motif)
One of the poem's most important motifs is that of dehumanization and objectification. While the poem begins with a sense of the victim as an individual, starting in the eighth line all references to "him" or "his" disappear and the victim becomes only a “char,” “body,” or “thing." Crucially, the introduction of this lexicon of objectification also appears at the same time as a lexicon of seeing ("view," "look," "eyes"), emphasizing how the black body becomes a spectacle for its white audience. Depicting women who "throng" to view the corpse and children who even make it the center of their "fiendish" dance, the poem denounces the gross dehumanization, objectification, and overeroticization of the black body in American culture.
Day and Night (motif)
References to day and night also have an important function in McKay's poem, not only in terms of the "plot" of the poem but also in the secondary layer of meaning they provide. References to night are indeed a recurring element in anti-lynching poems, for instance in Robert Hayden's "Night, Death, Mississippi," and here McKay draws on the expressive potential of the associations of night with darkness, horror, and, especially, solitude. Even more importantly, though, McKay subverts the connotations of a "new day"—the idea of new beginnings encoded in the ideology that "tomorrow is another day." For the dawning of a new day in the second half of the poem heralds not a hopeful new beginning but only the continuity of racial violence, with the unfeeling spectators gathering to see the spectacle from the night before and the children preparing for their own role as "lynchers that were to be."
