In the poem “Negro” by Langston Hughes the speakers goes into deep thought as he reflects on the different hats African Americans have worn throughout history. The speaker is very proud to be an African American as he celebrates the achievements African Americans have made throughout history although faced with adversity. The “Negro” was written by Langston Hughes who was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. He grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, but also lived in Illinois, Ohio, and Mexico. The first poem he wrote was “The Negro Speaks of Rivers" in the Crisis, which was edited by his mentor W E. B. Du Bois. That poem was written while he attended Columbia University in New York. After college he was able to travel abroad. He went to the west coast of Africa while he worked on a freighter. He also lived In Paris for several months before returning to the United States late in 1924. When he returned back to his country he was already well known in the African American literary circles as a gifted young poet. He was dedicated to African American music and held a special interest for jazz and the blues. Hughes was notability one of the most important writers and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance. His worked has not only shaped literature but help to change political views. Hughes loved being a “Negro” with a strong sense of racial pride. He’s written a lot of poetry, novels, plays, essays, and children's books, promoting racial equality, and condemned racism and injustice. He celebrated African American culture, humor, and spirituality. (Andrew, Foster and Harris) In the poem “Nego by Langston Hughes the speaker immediately identifies himself as a “Negro” and by doing so he shows the audience that he takes pride in being an A... ... middle of paper ... ...st buildings in the world at the time. The speaker refers to himself as a singer all the way from Africa to Georgia; he’s acknowledging the spirits of his ancestors. Although he carried sorrow because of oppression he still made time to cheer up and dance during ragtime. Even though he’s been victimize, hands cut off by the Belgians in the Congo he pressed on. He’s risen even with his self-esteem and spirits put to death back Mississippi. (Kirszner and Mandell) This poem represents the resiliency of the African American spirit, Although African Americans were enslaved, overworked and victimize the speaker is still proud to be a “Negro.” The speaker wanted to be the voice that represented all the unfair and injustice experience African American endured. Most importantly he wanted to end the poem they way he started the poem… Proud to be a “Negro.” .
The history of African American discrimination is a despicable part of the United States’ past. Inequality among Black Americans prompts these individuals to overcome the hardships. This endurance is valued by African Americans and people all around the world. However, the ability to strive and maintain positivity in a difficult or prejudiced situation proves to be tremendously challenging. When people give up in tough times, they deny their opportunity to succeed and grow stronger. This paper examines the techniques that manifest the struggles of racism and the importance of conquering obstacles in the following poems: Dream Deferred, I, Too and Mother to Son.
The civil rights movement may have technically ended in the nineteen sixties, but America is still feeling the adverse effects of this dark time in history today. African Americans were the group of people most affected by the Civil Rights Act and continue to be today. Great pain and suffering, though, usually amounts to great literature. This period in American history was no exception. Langston Hughes was a prolific writer before, during, and after the Civil Rights Act and produced many classic poems for African American literature. Hughes uses theme, point of view, and historical context in his poems “I, Too” and “Theme for English B” to expand the views on African American culture to his audience members.
Pinckney, Darryl. “Black Identity in Langston Hughes.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, And Drama. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 3rd Compact ed. New York: Longman 2003. 772-773.
The Harlem Renaissance gave a voice to many gifted artists, writers, and poets. Perhaps, for the first time, people were using the arts on a broad scale to give national and international voice to the long-silenced personal and political struggles of America’s ethnic other, specifically the African-American. Among the many gifted poets of the movement, Langston Hughes is, easily, one of the most recognizable and influential. Although his poems are lyrically beautiful, many of them also admonish a mythologized, free America as little more than a quaint, and for many, wholly unattainable model. Two of Hughes’ best known works, “Let American Be America Again” and “I, Too” speak directly to the grotesque imbalance of freedoms and rights in the U.S.. Using a number of literary devices, Hughes creates poems that are as poetically striking as they are politically and socially defiant. Through precise word choice, metaphor, and physical structure, Hughes creates multi-dimensional speakers who address two separate and unequal audiences. In these anthem-like poems, the speakers expound on their overwhelming desire for equality, unity, and freedom by addressing the short-comings of a capitalist system that makes commodities out of oppressed individuals and populations. Hughes’s poems focus on the American dream, a fantasy that is off-limits to anyone on the wrong side of the color line or income gap; however, despite their scathing criticisms, a patriotic hopefulness resides at the core of these two poems.
James Nathaniel Langston Hughes has a very significant role in the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance, also called the New Negro Movement, was a literary movement of the African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s. Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902 and he is not only a poet, but he is also a social activist, playwright, and novelist. His works are mainly influenced by his life in Harlem and he is often considered as the “Poem Laureate of the Harlem Renaissance.” Also, Langston Hughes’ “literary works helped shape American literature and politics” (“Langston Hughes”). Some of his role during the Harlem Renaissance was to promote racial equality, celebrate the life of black people, and encourage his fellow African Americans.
Johnson, Patricia A., and Walter C. Farrell. "How Langston Hughes Used the Blues." Melus Oppression and Ethnic Literature 6.1 55-63. The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS). www.jstor.org. (1971):
This image is the author’s perspective on the treatment of “his people” in not only his hometown of Harlem, but also in his own homeland, the country in which he lives. The author’s dream of racial equality is portrayed as a “raisin in the sun,” which “stinks like rotten meat” (Hughes 506). Because Hughes presents such a blatantly honest and dark point of view such as this, it is apparent that the author’s goal is to ensure that the reader is compelled to face the issues and tragedies that are occurring in their country, compelled enough to take action. This method may have been quite effective in exposing the plight of African-Americans to Caucasians. It can be easily seen that Hughes chooses a non-violent and, almost passive method of evoking a change. While Hughes appears to be much less than proud of his homeland, it is apparent that he hopes for a future when he may feel equal to his fellow citizens, which is the basis of the “dream” that has been
His overall poem envisions a day in which black and whites will eat “at the table” together, as equal Americans with the same human and civil rights. His poem contains two major themes of patriotism and equality. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker declares that he too can “sing America”, meaning that the speaker has the right to openly feel patriotic towards the American country. Even though the speaker is a different, darker skin color, and is not allowed to sit at the table and has to eat in the kitchen, he should still be able to appreciate and celebrate the country he resides in. If he wanted to be patriotic, he argues that it’s unnecessary to care about race when there’s commonality in country and patriotic attitude. There’s a hopeful tone to this poem, as the speaker shows that African Americans are a valuable part in the American country and he foresees a future with a racially equal society. African Americans at the time, like Hughes, suffered from common racial segregation practices and were forced to face constant discrimination in their everyday lives, and with that, equality is the second theme that he addresses in this
The pain within this poem can still be found within parts of our community in today’s society. This poem was written in 1951, during a time when the struggles for civil and social rights and equality battered and swept the nation. Opening up a poem with particular words choices such as “deferred”, implicates the already existing struggle with the dreams of African Americans. Readers would possibly correlate dreams to happy, positive, motivating thoughts and images, rather than terms such as “rotting meat” or “festering like a sore” (lines 4-6).
The title of this paper was inspired by the famous black poet, Langston Hughes’, poem Negro, which is included in the book The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes’ works are world renowned classics years after the start of his career. Hughes’ works were very influential in the age of the Harlem Renaissance. They are some of the greatest and most eye-opening works of that time. The research undertaken in this paper will include some aspects of his personal life, educational background, important works, the difference in his writing styles and the achievements that he acquired during his career.
Hughes speaks about black oppression in a full range of representation. The blacks that Hughes focuses most of his writing on are the “most burdened and oppressed of the black underclass, and people who have the most reason to despair but show the least evidence of it” (Bloom, “Thematic Analysis of the ‘Weary Blues’” 14). He tells the story of their life and times to voice his displeasure with the oppression of blacks (“Langston Hughes” 792). His work opens the public’s eye about what it is like to be black in America (“Langston Hughes” 792). In Hughes’ short poem “Harlem,” the speaker of the poem questions how the African American dream of equal opportunity is being constantly deferred and suppressed by white society (Niemi 1). Hughes wants his work to illuminate the fact that blacks miss opportunities due to their oppression.
James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri (Otfinoski). His mother wrote poetry and his father wanted to be a lawyer, but he was rejected by an all-white examination board to take a bar exam (Otfinoski). When he was young, his parents separated and his father moved to Mexico to escape the racism, so Hughes “wandered from place to place” with his mother and grandmother (Otfinoski). His grandmother’s second husband, Hughes’s grandfather, Charles Harold Langston, was a committed abolitionist and Virginia’s first black congressman (Otfinoski). As Hughes grew up, his grandmother enrolled him at Harrison Street School, where he encountered his first experience with white people, and it taught him “not to hate all white people” (Otfinoski). Hughes tried to achieve his goal throughout high school and college, until he finally stumbled upon a major turning point in his life when he met a poet, Vachel Lindsay, as a “tall, black busboy” (Otfinoski). Hughes made...
Langston Hughes poems reflect the cultural expectation and limitation of being an African American in the mid 1900’s. Poems like “Harlem” and “dreams” reflect how the African American community too had dreams. But due their societal position, they were faced with a dilemma. The dilemma of going against the strong white opposing force or succumb and leave their dreams to “dry up like a raisin in the sun”.
Analyzing the poem’s title sets a somber, yet prideful tone for this poem. The fact that the title does not say “I Speak of Rivers,” but instead, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1) shows that he is not only a Negro, but that he is not one specific Negro, but in his first person commentary, he is speaking for all Negroes. However, he is not just speaking for any Negroes. Considering the allusions to “Mississippi” (9) and “Abe Lincoln” (9) are not only to Negroes but also to America, confirms that Hughes is talking for all African Americans. This poem is a proclamation on the whole of African American history as it has grown and flourished along the rivers which gave life to these people.
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.