“Wingfoot Lake” engages with multiple decades of American history, but does so through the lens of “Independence Day, 1964,” just two days after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law. At this time, America was in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968), which sought to abolish disenfranchisement, discrimination, and racial segregation. While the Civil Rights Movement resulted in legislative reform and the end of institutionalized racial segregation, it also embodied ideas and notions that made the youth-based movement at odds with the older generations. This generational conflict is best represented by Beulah’s struggle with the term “Afro-Americans” (Line 25).

It is also important to note that Dove, who would have been 11 years old during “Independence Day, 1964,” wrote the poem in the mid-1980s—over 20 years after the poem’s setting. Dove not only has the benefit of hindsight regarding the outcome of the Civil Rights Movement, but of the struggles people faced in actualizing those outcomes. Less than two weeks after Independence Day of 1964, a 15-year-old Black boy named James Powell was shot and killed in Harlem. This event marked the beginning of the urban uprising, or the “long, hot summer” of race-related protests and riots that exploded across 12 northern cities and persisted until 1967.