The Author's Purpose: Langston Hughes The Negro Speaks Of Rivers

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Recommended: Langston Hughes encounters racism

Alicia McCrea
Mrs.Franco
Reading 8-1
13 March 2018
Author’s Purpose: Langston Hughes African Americans have been struggling with abandonment from their own society, since the beginning of time. Since the beginning, African Americans have been treated unfairly, people making them feel unimportant or non useful, leaving them sheepish in the eyes of others. Langston Hughes speaks about the rivers for it’s symbol of civilzation, linking himself to his ancestors and their important historical, religious and cultural sites throughout the world. The poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ by Langston Hughes Langston Hughes’ purpose for writing “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is to symbolize empowerment through the use of the rivers and ancestry of African Americans. …show more content…

Instead of writing about wealthy African Americans, Langston Hughes had written about the struggles of the African American individuals which he met. He began writing about the African Americans in his childhood, continuing to write about people of his ethnicity later, so that others would be informed of what was behind the facade, and what the African Americans went through. Hughes uses rivers to show that there is the past and there is a present but we are always going to continue to move forward. He’s showing throughout the poem that he knows history, he knows the“rivers, rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins”(Hughes, Lines

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