Langston Hughes Tone

Langston Hughes has maintained a position at the top of the poetry world with poems relating to race relations and the injustice of white people’s actions that target blacks in the United States. Hughes was writing before the Civil Rights Movement, so he felt firsthand, as a black man, the rampant racism that ran through the country. As a black man, Hughes was well aware of the dangers of publishing material that called for desegregation in a country where blacks were hung on tree limbs and crosses were burned on front lawns; nevertheless, he believed there was a necessity for his work to be published to advocate for the equal rights of the African Americans. In Hughes’s poems, I, Too and Freedom, the tones of the poem come across as patriotic, but also call for a need to unify the nation. After a first reading of I, Too, it is plainly obvious that Hughes is commenting on the racial segregation of the United States. The second line, “I am the darker brother,” (872), is essential to this poem because it explains that Hughes is a black man, who is associating himself in a

/ I want freedom / Just as you,” (878). The last stanza breaks the pattern of the poem where each line had four lines, except for the third, which had five. By breaking the pattern of having longer stanzas, it immediately draws the reader into that passage and demands attention. He ends his essay by relating his wishes to his audience—his intended audience for this play is white people, particularly those who hold racist values—attempting to create a similarity between himself and the reader. By writing the word, “you” at the end of the poem, he makes the meaning of the poem very personal to the reader. Hughes wrote the ending of the poem so that he was speaking directly to the reader, as if one would be in a conversation with him. The poem Freedom calls for the desegregation of the peoples of America because they have a similar want: