An'+ain't+they+Black?

This sentence does not refer to a soiled sole or someone with a murky background. No, in this sentence, Maya Angelou is talking about race. She touches upon a bigger image in her poem then one might think at first. My next thought was racism, because she says, "ain't they black" AND "ain't they bad." However, this seems unlikely when you consider that the author is a famous black woman herself. Instead, I think that she is searching for something and that she herself does not know the answer to the question that she repeats.