The Poem Called Let America Be America Again and I Too
Langston Hughes signs autographs following a lecture at Howard University in 1957 (Washington Area Spark/Flickr)
Following Donald Trump's election, a poem by Langston Hughes started trending on social media and, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and others in law custody, the poem has found new urgency. Perhaps it was the word again that get-go drew people's attention. Decades before Trump used the word in his 2016 campaign slogan to "Brand America Great Again," Hughes published a poem called "Permit America Be America Once more."
Sometimes referred to as the "poet laureate of Harlem," Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest. After living in Mexico for a twelvemonth, he arrived in New York in 1921 to study engineering at Columbia University. 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's first verse form, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," published in 1921, addressed the Blackness experience in America: "My soul has grown deep similar the rivers."
Hughes left Columbia and traveled to the due west declension of Africa, Rotterdam, Paris, and northern Italy, returning to the United States in 1924. In 1926, he published his first volume of poems, The Weary Blues. Influenced by poets such as Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hughes embraced free poesy. His drove included the poem "I, Too," which opens "I, as well, sing America," and closes "I, also, am America." ("I hear America singing," his spiritual mentor Whitman had written.)
In 1929, Hughes graduated from Lincoln University, the nation's first degree-granting historically Blackness 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. Only he never joined the Communist Party, as many of his friends may have.
Hughes published "Let America Be America Once again" in an abbreviated version in 1936 and in its terminal course two years subsequently in A New Song, a collection issued by the International Workers Order. The piece of work addresses the significant of America and offers both a critique and an affirmation of the American ideal.
Lamenting the weather of the Depression, with millions unemployed, the poem asks what happened to America, the purported "homeland of the gratis."
It begins "Let America exist America again / Permit it be the dream it used to be," then continues, "Let America exist the dream the dreamers dreamed." Information technology'due south a dream of freedom, equality, opportunity, and liberty—the ideals that form the bedrock of the nation. Yet a parenthetic vox adds, "(America never was America to me)."
If you lot 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 poem anticipates this assumption, and a new voice asks, "Say, who are you that mumbles in the night?" What follows is a listing of everyday Americans: "the poor white," "the Negro," "the ruddy man," "the immigrant," "the farmer," "the worker." All are carrying hope for a better time to come, and all take fallen victim to "the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak." America is not America to any of them.
Given Hughes's radical sympathies, the class assay is not 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 have nothing left now "except the dream that'due south nearly dead today."
About dead, yet unvanquished.
For Hughes, the United States was an unrealized, perhaps unrealizable ideal. It was a land that "never has been yet— / And yet must exist," a dreamland unlike whatever other country. Simply the nation's failure fourth dimension and over again to live up to its aspirations is a profound part of the story. Whatever its struggles, the United States has always identified itself past its dreams. Dreams inspired by abstractions like republic, justice, and rights. Dreams animated by those seeking freedom and equality. Dreams stirred by those making a new home in America and pursuing a ameliorate life. Hughes believed in those dreams, and his verse form ends non with despair, simply 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 over again!
Hughes would continue to recall almost America, request, "What happens to a dream deferred?" in a 1951 poem titled "Harlem." Martin Luther King Jr. had too been contemplating dreams, long earlier his "I Have a Dream" oral communication 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), withal, King publicly kept his distance. Even so, in 1967, vii months afterwards Hughes died, he declared that although "I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes … I nonetheless have a dream."
King must take appreciated the endmost of "Let America Be America Again," where the people are summoned to redeem the country. In a sermon kickoff delivered in 1954, he declared that "instead of making history, we are made by history."
The line is hands misunderstood. Rex was non offering an statement for why history matters; rather, he was decrying passivity and insisting on empowerment. It was a call to activity. The preacher was telling his congregation that the time for waiting on dreams was over—the time for making dreams come true had begun.
Source: https://theamericanscholar.org/let-america-be-america-again/
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