What Did Huges Eant to Acheive in His Poem Let America Be America Again
Langston Hughes signs autographs following a lecture at Howard University in 1957 (Washington Area Spark/Flickr)
Following Donald Trump's election, a poem past Langston Hughes started trending on social media and, in the aftermath of the decease of George Floyd and others in law custody, the verse form has found new urgency. Peradventure information technology was the word again that get-go drew people's attention. Decades before Trump used the discussion in his 2022 campaign slogan to "Make America Bully Once again," Hughes published a poem called "Let America Be America Once again."
Sometimes referred to as the "poet laureate of Harlem," Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest. Afterward living in Mexico for a year, he arrived in New York in 1921 to written report applied science at Columbia Academy. Drawn to the literary life, he joined other voices at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, writers such as Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Arna Bontemps. Hughes's kickoff poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," published in 1921, addressed the Black experience in America: "My soul has grown deep similar the rivers."
Hughes left Columbia and traveled to the west coast of Africa, Rotterdam, Paris, and northern Italian republic, returning to the U.s.a. in 1924. In 1926, he published his first book of poems, The Weary Blues. Influenced by poets such every bit Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hughes embraced free poetry. His drove included the verse form "I, Too," which opens "I, also, sing America," and closes "I, too, am America." ("I hear America singing," his spiritual mentor Whitman had written.)
In 1929, Hughes graduated from Lincoln University, the nation'south first degree-granting historically Black college. He continued to travel widely and, through the 1930s, wrote poems, plays, short 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 take.
Hughes published "Let America Be America Again" in an abbreviated version in 1936 and in its final course two years later in A New Vocal, a collection issued by the International Workers Guild. The work addresses the meaning of America and offers both a critique and an affidavit of the American ideal.
Lamenting the atmospheric condition of the Depression, with millions unemployed, the poem asks what happened to America, the purported "homeland of the costless."
It begins "Let America be America once again / Let it be the dream information technology used to be," and so continues, "Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed." Information technology'due south a dream of liberty, equality, opportunity, and freedom—the ideals that form the boulder of the nation. Even so a parenthetic vocalism adds, "(America never was America to me)."
If you know Hughes's work, it 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 crimson man," "the immigrant," "the farmer," "the worker." All are carrying hope for a ameliorate future, and all take fallen victim to "the same old stupid program / Of dog eat canis familiaris, of mighty crush the weak." America is non America to whatsoever of them.
Given Hughes's radical sympathies, the class assay is not surprising. The poem laments the weather 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's almost expressionless today."
Virtually dead, yet unvanquished.
For Hughes, the United states of america was an unrealized, perhaps unrealizable ideal. It was a land that "never has been yet— / And yet must exist," a dreamland unlike any other land. But the nation'due south failure time and again to alive up to its aspirations is a profound office of the story. Whatever its struggles, the The states has always identified itself by its dreams. Dreams inspired by abstractions like commonwealth, justice, and rights. Dreams animated by those seeking freedom and equality. Dreams stirred by those making a new home in America and pursuing a better life. Hughes believed in those dreams, and his verse form ends not with despair, merely with an urgent plea:
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great light-green states—
And brand America again!
Hughes would continue to think about America, request, "What happens to a dream deferred?" in a 1951 poem titled "Harlem." Martin Luther Rex Jr. had too been contemplating dreams, long earlier his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. King and Hughes were friends: in 1956, King recited a Hughes verse form, "Mother to Son," from the pulpit. Because of the poet's suspected Communist sympathies (Hughes had testified before Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations), nevertheless, King publicly kept his altitude. Even then, in 1967, seven months later on Hughes died, he declared that although "I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes … I still have a dream."
Male monarch must have appreciated the closing of "Let America Be America Again," where the people are summoned to redeem the state. In a sermon starting time delivered in 1954, he declared that "instead of making history, we are made by history."
The line is easily misunderstood. King was not offering an argument for why history matters; rather, he was decrying passivity and insisting on empowerment. It 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 truthful had begun.
Source: https://theamericanscholar.org/let-america-be-america-again/
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