Analysis Let America Be America Again
Langston Hughes signs autographs post-obit a lecture at Howard Academy in 1957 (Washington Area Spark/Flickr)
Following Donald Trump'southward election, a poem by Langston Hughes started trending on social media and, in the backwash of the death of George Floyd and others in police custody, the poem has institute new urgency. Possibly it was the word once again that first drew people's attending. Decades before Trump used the discussion in his 2016 campaign slogan to "Brand America Smashing 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. After living in Mexico for a year, he arrived in New York in 1921 to study technology at Columbia Academy. Fatigued 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 starting time 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 w coast of Africa, Rotterdam, Paris, and northern Italy, returning to the The states 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 free poesy. His collection included the poem "I, Too," which opens "I, too, sing America," and closes "I, likewise, am America." ("I hear America singing," his spiritual mentor Whitman had written.)
In 1929, Hughes graduated from Lincoln University, the nation'southward first caste-granting historically Black higher. He continued to travel widely and, through the 1930s, wrote poems, plays, curt 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, every bit many of his friends may have.
Hughes published "Let America Be America Again" in an abbreviated version in 1936 and in its terminal grade ii years later in A New Song, a collection issued by the International Workers Gild. The work addresses the meaning 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 free."
Information technology begins "Permit America be America once more / Let information technology exist the dream information technology used to be," then continues, "Let America exist the dream the dreamers dreamed." It'south a dream of freedom, equality, opportunity, and liberty—the ethics that grade the boulder of the nation. Yet a parenthetic voice adds, "(America never was America to me)."
If you know Hughes's work, information technology is tempting to read the parenthetic "me" as a victim of the long history of racial segregation and oppression. The verse form anticipates this supposition, and a new vox asks, "Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?" What follows is a list of everyday Americans: "the poor white," "the Negro," "the cerise man," "the immigrant," "the farmer," "the worker." All are carrying hope for a better future, and all have fallen victim to "the same old stupid plan / Of canis familiaris swallow domestic dog, of mighty crush the weak." America is not America to any of them.
Given Hughes'southward radical sympathies, the grade analysis is not surprising. The verse form 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 so many have nothing left now "except the dream that'southward nearly dead today."
Almost dead, withal unvanquished.
For Hughes, the Us was an unrealized, perhaps unrealizable ideal. It was a land that "never has been nevertheless— / And even so must be," a dreamland unlike any other country. Simply the nation's failure time and again to live up to its aspirations is a profound part of the story. Whatever its struggles, the United states has ever identified itself past 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 home in America and pursuing a better life. Hughes believed in those dreams, and his poem ends non with despair, only 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 cracking light-green states—
And make America again!
Hughes would go along to think most America, asking, "What happens to a dream deferred?" in a 1951 poem titled "Harlem." Martin Luther King Jr. had as well been contemplating dreams, long earlier his "I Accept a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Male monarch and Hughes were friends: in 1956, Male monarch 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 distance. Even so, in 1967, 7 months after Hughes died, he declared that although "I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes … I still have a dream."
Rex must have appreciated the closing of "Let America Be America Once again," where the people are summoned to redeem the land. In a sermon starting time delivered in 1954, he declared that "instead of making history, nosotros are made by history."
The line is hands 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 fourth dimension for making dreams come true had begun.
Source: https://theamericanscholar.org/let-america-be-america-again/
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