When Was Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes Writtem
Langston Hughes signs autographs post-obit a lecture at Howard University in 1957 (Washington Area Spark/Flickr)
Following Donald Trump'due south election, a poem past Langston Hughes started trending on social media and, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and others in police force custody, the poem has found new urgency. Possibly it was the word again that beginning drew people's attention. Decades earlier Trump used the give-and-take in his 2016 campaign slogan to "Make America Great Again," Hughes published a verse form called "Let America Exist America Again."
Sometimes referred to equally the "poet laureate of Harlem," Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest. After living in United mexican states 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 beginning 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 U.s. in 1924. In 1926, he published his first volume of poems, The Weary Blues. Influenced by poets such every bit Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hughes embraced gratuitous poesy. His collection included the poem "I, Also," 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's first caste-granting historically Blackness college. He continued to travel widely and, through the 1930s, wrote poems, plays, brusk stories, and a novel. He was sympathetic to radical causes, and his work across the decade displayed a socialist rhetoric mutual to the era. Just he never joined the Communist Party, as many of his friends may have.
Hughes published "Let America Exist America Again" in an abbreviated version in 1936 and in its final course ii years later in A New Song, a collection issued by the International Workers Lodge. The piece of work addresses the meaning of America and offers both a critique and an affirmation of the American ideal.
Lamenting the conditions of the Low, with millions unemployed, the poem asks what happened to America, the purported "homeland of the gratis."
It begins "Let America be America again / Permit it be the dream it used to be," then continues, "Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed." Information technology's a dream of freedom, equality, opportunity, and freedom—the ethics that form the bedrock of the nation. Withal a parenthetic voice adds, "(America never was America to me)."
If you know Hughes'south piece of 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 list of everyday Americans: "the poor white," "the Negro," "the red human," "the immigrant," "the farmer," "the worker." All are carrying hope for a ameliorate time to come, and all have fallen victim to "the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty beat out 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 weather condition of the Low, with millions unemployed and on relief, and asks what happened to America, the purported "homeland of the free," where and then many have zippo left now "except the dream that's almost dead today."
Virtually dead, nonetheless unvanquished.
For Hughes, the United States was an unrealized, perhaps unrealizable platonic. It was a country that "never has been yet— / And however must be," a dreamland different any other country. Only the nation's failure time and over again to live upwardly to its aspirations is a profound part of the story. Whatever its struggles, the United States has ever identified itself by its dreams. Dreams inspired by abstractions like democracy, justice, and rights. Dreams animated by those seeking freedom and equality. Dreams stirred past those making a new home in America and pursuing a better life. Hughes believed in those dreams, and his poem 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 apparently—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
Hughes would proceed to call up well-nigh 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 Take 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. Because of the poet's suspected Communist sympathies (Hughes had testified before Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations), however, King publicly kept his altitude. Even so, in 1967, vii months after Hughes died, he alleged that although "I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes … I still take a dream."
King must have appreciated the closing of "Let America Exist 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, we are made by history."
The line is hands misunderstood. King was not offer an argument for why history matters; rather, he was decrying passivity and insisting on empowerment. It was a phone call to action. The preacher was telling his congregation that the time for waiting on dreams was over—the time for making dreams come up true had begun.
Source: https://theamericanscholar.org/let-america-be-america-again/
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