This poem by Richard Wright may mean different things to different people. It also may come across as hard to understand for some. For me, towards the beginning i didn't really understand what was happening very clearly. I knew that the character saw the remains of people that had just died. towards the end i started understanding the rest of the poem more. I realized that these people were tarred and feathered, and then tied to trees and burned. The character sort of went back in time, and experienced what these people did.
As far as relating this poem to the time period when " To Kill a Mockingbird", was written, there is only one thing i can relate this to. The time period around the 1930s, was a rough time for minorites, and they faced discrimination. The only guess i have at what the poem is describing, is a lynching of some sort. This makes sense, and relates to the overall them of the book. I have read this story before and i know that it discusses issues the rights of African Americans. In some ways i can invision the main character and narrator of this poem, as being Atticus Finch. He sees what is happening to these people, and then puts himselves in theyre shoes, and understands what they are going through. He then has the desire to help them more, and accept them as equals. This was a tough thing to do in a time period when almost no one did this.