Let America Be America Again Date
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 discussion again that commencement drew people'south attention. Decades before Trump used the word in his 2016 entrada slogan to "Brand America Bang-up Again," Hughes published a verse form chosen "Let America Be America Again."
Sometimes referred to equally the "poet laureate of Harlem," Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest. Later living in Mexico for a year, 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 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 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 Italian republic, returning to the U.s. in 1924. In 1926, he published his first book of poems, The Weary Blues. Influenced by poets such as Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hughes embraced gratuitous verse. His collection included the verse form "I, Too," which opens "I, too, 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 get-go 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 piece of work beyond 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 Again" in an abbreviated version in 1936 and in its final course two years subsequently in A New Vocal, a drove issued past the International Workers Guild. The work addresses the significant 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 gratuitous."
It begins "Let America be America again / Let information technology exist the dream it used to exist," then continues, "Allow America be the dream the dreamers dreamed." It's a dream of freedom, equality, opportunity, and freedom—the ideals that course the bedrock of the nation. Yet a parenthetic voice adds, "(America never was America to me)."
If you know Hughes'due south 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 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 carrying promise for a better future, and all have fallen victim to "the same quondam stupid programme / Of dog consume domestic dog, of mighty crush the weak." America is not America to any of them.
Given Hughes's radical sympathies, the class analysis is not surprising. The poem laments the conditions of the Depression, with millions unemployed and on relief, and asks what happened to America, the purported "homeland of the free," where and then many have aught left now "except the dream that's about expressionless today."
Nigh dead, withal unvanquished.
For Hughes, the The states was an unrealized, perhaps unrealizable ideal. It was a state that "never has been yet— / And notwithstanding must exist," a dreamland unlike whatever other state. But the nation's failure time and again to live up to its aspirations is a profound part of the story. Whatever its struggles, the U.s.a. has always identified itself by its dreams. Dreams inspired past abstractions similar commonwealth, justice, and rights. Dreams animated by those seeking freedom and equality. Dreams stirred by those making a new dwelling house in America and pursuing a better life. Hughes believed in those dreams, and his poem ends non with despair, but with an urgent plea:
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the countless patently—
All, all the stretch of these bully green states—
And make America again!
Hughes would continue to remember near America, asking, "What happens to a dream deferred?" in a 1951 verse form titled "Harlem." Martin Luther Male monarch Jr. had likewise been contemplating dreams, long before his "I Have a Dream" oral communication at the Lincoln Memorial. King 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'south Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations), nevertheless, King publicly kept his distance. Even so, in 1967, vii months subsequently Hughes died, he declared that although "I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes … I nevertheless have a dream."
King must have appreciated the closing of "Permit America Be America Again," where the people are summoned to redeem the land. In a sermon first delivered in 1954, he alleged that "instead of making history, nosotros are made by history."
The line is easily misunderstood. Male monarch was not offer an argument 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 time 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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