years at Michigan, Hayden went to Fisk University in 1946, where he remained for twenty-three years, returning to Michigan in 1969 to complete his teaching career. Concurrent with his teaching responsibilities at Fisk, he served as poet-in-residence at Indiana State University in 1967 and visiting poet at the University of Washington in 1969, the University of Connecticut in 1971, Dennison University in 1972, and Connecticut College in 1974. As a supporter of his religion's teaching of the unity of humanity, Hayden could never embrace Black separatism. Thus the title poem of Words in the Mourning Time ends in a stirring plea in the name of all humanity: Reclaim now, now renew the vision of a human world where godliness is possible and man is neither gook nigger honkey wop or kike but man permitted to be man. He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 25, 1980, aged 66. In 2012 the U.S. Postal Service issued a pane of stamps featuring ten great Twentieth Century American Poets, including Hayden. Career By the 1960s and the rise of the Black Arts Movement, when a more youthful era of African-American artists composed politically and emotionally charged protest poetry overwhelmingly coordinated to a black audience, Hayden's philosophy about the function of poetry and the way he characterized himself as an author were settled. His refusal to revamp himself as indicated by the pictures of the 1960s earned him feedback from a few scholars and analysts. Hayden stayed consistent with his idea of poetry as an artistic frame instead of a polemical demonstration and to his conviction that poetry ought to, in addition to other things, address the qualities shared by mankind, including social injustice. Hayden's beliefs about the relationship of the artist to his poems likewise had impact in his refusal to compose emotionally determined protest sonnets. Hayden's practice was to make separation between the speaker and the movement of the poem. His work often addressed the plight of African Americans, usually using his former home of Paradise Valley slum as a backdrop, as he does in the poem "Heart-Shape in the Dust". He made ready use of black vernacular and folk speech, and he wrote political poetry as well, including a sequence on the Vietnam War. On the first poem of the sequence, he said: "I was trying to convey the idea that the horrors of the war became a kind of