Langston Hughes Make America America Again Poems

Langston Hughes signs autographs following a lecture at Howard University in 1957 (Washington Area Spark/Flickr)

Following Donald Trump's election, a verse form past Langston Hughes started trending on social media and, in the aftermath of the decease of George Floyd and others in police force custody, the verse form has found new urgency. Perhaps it was the word again that first drew people's attention. Decades earlier Trump used the discussion in his 2016 campaign slogan to "Make America Great Over again," Hughes published a poem called "Let America Be America Once more."

Sometimes referred to equally the "poet laureate of Harlem," Hughes was built-in in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest. Subsequently living in United mexican states for a year, he arrived in New York in 1921 to study engineering at Columbia Academy. Drawn to the literary life, he joined other voices at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, writers such every bit Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Arna Bontemps. Hughes'southward offset verse form, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," published in 1921, addressed the Black experience in America: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

Hughes left Columbia and traveled to the west coast of Africa, Rotterdam, Paris, and northern Italy, returning to the United States in 1924. In 1926, he published his start book of poems, The Weary Dejection. Influenced by poets such equally Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hughes embraced gratuitous verse. His drove included the poem "I, Too," which opens "I, too, sing America," and closes "I, likewise, am America." ("I hear America singing," his spiritual mentor Whitman had written.)

In 1929, Hughes graduated from Lincoln University, the nation'southward starting time caste-granting historically Black college. He continued to travel widely and, through the 1930s, wrote poems, plays, curt stories, and a novel. He was sympathetic to radical causes, and his work across the decade displayed a socialist rhetoric common to the era. But he never joined the Communist Party, as many of his friends may accept.

Hughes published "Permit America Exist America Again" in an abbreviated version in 1936 and in its final form two years afterward in A New Vocal, a collection issued by the International Workers Club. The work addresses the meaning of America and offers both a critique and an affirmation of the American ideal.

Lamenting the conditions of the Depression, with millions unemployed, the poem asks what happened to America, the purported "homeland of the free."

It begins "Let America exist America once more / Allow information technology be the dream information technology used to be," and then continues, "Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed." It'southward a dream of freedom, equality, opportunity, and liberty—the ethics that form the bedrock of the nation. Yet a parenthetic vox adds, "(America never was America to me)."

If you know Hughes's piece of work, information technology is tempting to read the parenthetic "me" as a victim of the long history of racial segregation and oppression. The verse form anticipates this assumption, and a new voice asks, "Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?" What follows is a list of everyday Americans: "the poor white," "the Negro," "the red man," "the immigrant," "the farmer," "the worker." All are conveying hope for a better hereafter, and all have fallen victim to "the same old stupid programme / Of domestic dog consume dog, of mighty shell the weak." America is non America to any of them.

Given Hughes's radical sympathies, the class analysis is non surprising. The poem laments the weather condition of the Depression, with millions unemployed and on relief, and asks what happened to America, the purported "homeland of the free," where so many take nothing left at present "except the dream that'southward almost dead today."

Nearly expressionless, yet unvanquished.

For Hughes, the The states was an unrealized, perhaps unrealizable ideal. It was a country that "never has been yet— / And notwithstanding must exist," a dreamland unlike whatsoever other country. But the nation's failure time and again to alive up to its aspirations is a profound part of the story. Whatever its struggles, the United States has e'er identified itself by its dreams. Dreams inspired past abstractions similar democracy, justice, and rights. Dreams animated by those seeking liberty and equality. Dreams stirred by those making a new dwelling in America and pursuing a amend life. Hughes believed in those dreams, and his poem ends not with despair, only with an urgent plea:

We, the people, must redeem
The country, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the countless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Hughes would continue to recall almost America, asking, "What happens to a dream deferred?" in a 1951 poem titled "Harlem." Martin Luther King Jr. had also been contemplating dreams, long before his "I Have a Dream" spoken communication at the Lincoln Memorial. King and Hughes were friends: in 1956, King recited a Hughes poem, "Mother to Son," from the pulpit. Because of the poet'south suspected Communist sympathies (Hughes had testified before Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations), nonetheless, King publicly kept his distance. Nevertheless, in 1967, seven months after Hughes died, he declared that although "I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes … I nevertheless have a dream."

King must accept appreciated the closing of "Let America Be America Again," where the people are summoned to redeem the country. In a sermon first delivered in 1954, he declared that "instead of making history, nosotros are fabricated by history."

The line is easily misunderstood. King was not offering an statement for why history matters; rather, he was decrying passivity and insisting on empowerment. Information technology was a call to action. The preacher was telling his congregation that the fourth dimension for waiting on dreams was over—the time for making dreams come up truthful had begun.

Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

 is Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers Academy. This essay is adapted from his new book,The Sum of Our Dreams: A Concise History of America.

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Source: https://theamericanscholar.org/let-america-be-america-again/

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