African American Influence On Langston Hughes

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After slavery ended African Americans began to migrate north in efforts to escape the increasingly violent times in the south. White supremacy and Jim Crow laws made it all but impossible for a person of color to be anything close to equal to whites. During World War I many people were forced to serve leaving many American factories with a shortage of workers. African Americans took this opportunity to move to the North in efforts to have a better life. Harlem became the home of many artists, writers, and musicians. Those who found outlets in group expressions and self-determination as a means of achieving equality and civil rights. This time has been considered as the rebirth of the new negro, a term made popular by Alain Leroy Locke in his publication in 1925. Well known writer and artists such as County Cullen, James Johnson, Augusta Savage thrived in these times. But none were more prominent than Langston Hughes. He was the leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance and was one of the early writers who showed the …show more content…

Hughes didn't feel close to either parent and often felt unloved by them. Because of his childhood, he often felt lonely and occupied himself with books. At one point, he even said he wrote "mostly because, when I felt bad, writing kept me from feeling worse." After graduating high school, he wrote his first nationally published work The Negro Speaks Rivers, while on the train to Mexico to be with his estranged father. The poem was published a year later in W.E.B Dubois Crisis magazine. At the time, it was the first poem that celebrated and dignified Africa in American literature. The Negro Speaks Rivers
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to

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