Let America Be America Again Langston Hughes

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

Following Donald Trump'southward election, a poem by Langston Hughes started trending on social media and, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and others in police custody, the poem has plant new urgency. Possibly it was the word again that first drew people's attention. Decades earlier Trump used the word in his 2022 campaign slogan to "Make America Great Again," Hughes published a poem called "Allow America Be America Over again."

Sometimes referred to as the "poet laureate of Harlem," Hughes was built-in in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest. After living in Mexico for a year, he arrived in New York in 1921 to study 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 first poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," published in 1921, addressed the Black feel in America: "My soul has grown deep similar the rivers."

Hughes left Columbia and traveled to the w coast of Africa, Rotterdam, Paris, and northern Italia, returning to the U.s. in 1924. In 1926, he published his first book of poems, The Weary Dejection. Influenced by poets such equally Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hughes embraced free verse. His collection included the poem "I, Too," which opens "I, too, 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'due south kickoff degree-granting historically Black higher. 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 piece of work across the decade displayed a socialist rhetoric common to the era. Merely he never joined the Communist Party, as many of his friends may accept.

Hughes published "Permit America Be America Again" in an abbreviated version in 1936 and in its last form ii years after in A New Song, a collection issued by the International Workers Order. The piece of work addresses the meaning of America and offers both a critique and an affidavit 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 be America again / Let information technology be the dream it used to be," then continues, "Permit America be the dream the dreamers dreamed." It'southward a dream of liberty, equality, opportunity, and freedom—the ideals that form the bedrock of the nation. All the same a parenthetic voice adds, "(America never was America to me)."

If you know Hughes's work, it is tempting to read the parenthetic "me" equally a victim of the long history of racial segregation and oppression. The poem anticipates this assumption, and a new voice asks, "Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?" What follows is a listing of everyday Americans: "the poor white," "the Negro," "the red homo," "the immigrant," "the farmer," "the worker." All are carrying promise for a amend time to come, and all take fallen victim to "the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat canis familiaris, of mighty crush the weak." America is non America to any of them.

Given Hughes's radical sympathies, the class analysis is not surprising. The poem laments the conditions of the Low, with millions unemployed and on relief, and asks what happened to America, the purported "homeland of the free," where so many accept nothing left now "except the dream that'southward almost expressionless today."

Well-nigh dead, notwithstanding unvanquished.

For Hughes, the United States was an unrealized, perhaps unrealizable ideal. It was a land that "never has been yet— / And still must be," a dreamland unlike whatsoever other country. Just the nation'south failure time and once more to alive upward to its aspirations is a profound office of the story. Whatsoever its struggles, the The states has always identified itself by its dreams. Dreams inspired by abstractions like democracy, justice, and rights. Dreams animated by those seeking freedom and equality. Dreams stirred by those making a new habitation in America and pursuing a improve life. Hughes believed in those dreams, and his verse form ends not with despair, but with an urgent plea:

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

Hughes would continue to think nearly America, request, "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" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Male monarch and Hughes were friends: in 1956, King recited a Hughes poem, "Mother to Son," from the pulpit. Considering of the poet's suspected Communist sympathies (Hughes had testified before Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations), however, King publicly kept his distance. Even so, in 1967, seven months subsequently Hughes died, he declared that although "I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes … I withal have a dream."

King must have appreciated the closing of "Let America Exist America Again," where the people are summoned to redeem the country. In a sermon showtime delivered in 1954, he alleged that "instead of making history, nosotros are made by history."

The line is easily misunderstood. King was not offer an statement 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 true had begun.

Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

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

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

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