Langston Hughes

was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin,
Missouri. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career. One
of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is
best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. He famously
wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as
"when Harlem was in vogue".[2]
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Hughes’s greatest achievement was in poetry, and he continued to publish

collections. Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) pictured a Harlem life that had
changed drastically from its renaissance years of jazz and vibrant life in the 1920’s and
1930’s to a postwar ghetto of violence and blighted poverty. Stylistically, the velvety
rhythms of the blues that permeated his earlier poetry were often replaced by angular
rhythms of sharp contrast like those emanating from a modern bebop jazz session.
The poems in Ask Your Mama: Or, Twelve Hoods for Jazz (1961) explore the issue of
segregation and, among other things, picture a time when Martin Luther King, Jr., is
governor of Georgia and a former white segregationist governor has been relegated to
the position of caretaker “mammy” for little black children.

Achievements

All the works of Langston Hughes illustrate the depth of his commitment to a
celebration of black American life in all its forms and make immediately evident the
reason why he has been proclaimed the poet laureate of black America. As a young
poet, he won prizes in contests sponsored by The Crisis and Opportunity, and his first
two volumes of poetry, The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew, won critical
acclaim. He won the Witter Brynner Prize for best poetry by an undergraduate (1926),
a Harmon Gold Award (1930) for his novel Not Without Laughter, a Guggenheim
Fellowship (1935), a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1946), an Anisfeld-
Wolfe Book Award (1954) for Simple Takes a Wife, and the Spingarn Medal from the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1960.
Hughes’s receipt of a Rosenwald Fund Fellowship in 1941 enabled him to make his
first cross-country reading tour. He became a member of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters in 1961.
His stature as a humorist grew from his creation of Jesse B. Semple, also known as
Simple, a Harlem barstool philosopher in the tradition of American folk humor ranging
from Davy Crockett to Mr. Dooley. Hughes wrote about Simple in columns published in
the Chicago Defender, begun in the 1940’s and continuing into the 1960’s. His Simple
columns also appeared in the New York Post between 1962 and 1965. Publication of
his five books of Simple sketches increased the readership of that sage of Harlem with
his views on life in white America.

Although Hughes never had any one big seller, his efforts in so many fields of literary
endeavor earned for him the admiration and respect of readers in all walks of life.
Certainly, too, Hughes is a major poetic figure of his time and perhaps the best black
American poet.

Although perhaps best known for his poetry, Langston Hughes explored almost every
literary genre. His prose fiction includes novels, humorous books, historical,
biographical, autobiographical, and cultural works, translations, lyrics, librettos, plays,
and scripts. His total output includes more than seventy volumes, as well as numerous
articles, poems, and stories that have not yet been collected.

Achievements

Langston Hughes has been acknowledged both before and after his death as the most
influential African American writer in the English-speaking world. As a leader of the
Harlem Renaissance, he not only wrote in a variety of genres but also edited and
encouraged the literary, dramatic, and musical productions of other people of color.
Recognition came during his lifetime as early as 1925, when he won the Poetry Prize
given by Opportunity magazine and the Spingarn prizes of Crisis magazine for both
poetry and essay writing. His novel Not Without Laughter (1930) won the Harmon Gold
Medal in 1931. That year he received his first Rosenwald Fellowship, an award
repeated in 1941. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in
1935, the National Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature in 1946, and the
Ainsfield-Wolf Award in 1953 continued to keep him in the forefront of the literary
community, particularly in New York, throughout his life. His alma mater, Lincoln
University, awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1943, and he received others from
Howard University and Case Western Reserve University in 1963 and 1964,
respectively.
Summary

During his phenomenally creative life, Langston Hughes published seventeen books of
poetry, seven short story collections, twenty-six dramatic works, two novels, and two
autobiographies. He also edited anthologies and translated works of other writers.

While some criticize Hughes for remaining limited by his persistent focus on the
folkways, language, and basic issues surrounding lower-class African Americans and
regret that his portrayals of common black life sometimes failed to present a
progressive view of his race, Hughes himself always insisted that he was an honest,
social poet who did not know enough about upper-class black people to write about
them. He felt that while the poor black residents of Harlem may not have worn shined
shoes, been to Harvard, or listened to classical music, “they seemed to me,” he said,
“good people” who possessed a life force, survival instinct, and dignity worthy of his
artistic efforts and personal sympathy.

Also criticized by a new, more militant generation for supposedly not successfully
addressing the issues and politics of black power, Hughes’s writings, nonetheless,
continue to speak to readers who value his clear, vividly rendered, and honest vision of
his people. They value his celebration of their language, culture, and spirit so
beautifully permeated, in his most memorable poems, by the rhythms of blues and
jazz. Hughes’s rich, sensitive rendering of an authentic black voice and his fatherly role
as mentor for a whole generation of aspiring African American literary artists assure his
place as one of the most influential African American poets and writers of the twentieth
century.

African-American literature
African-American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by
writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers
as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of slave narratives, African-American
literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known
as slave narrativesin the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally
escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their
lives. The Harlem Renaissanceof the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature
and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and
those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African-
American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel
Prize to Toni Morrison. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the
role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American
culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to
incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.[1]
As African Americans' place in American society has changed over the centuries, so
has the focus of African-American literature. Before the American Civil War, the
literature primarily consisted of memoirs by people who had escaped from slavery; the
genre of slave narratives included accounts of life under slavery and the path of justice
and redemption to freedom. There was an early distinction between the literature
of freed slaves and the literature of free blacks born in the North. Free blacks
expressed their oppression in a different narrative form. Free blacks in the North often
spoke out against slavery and racial injustices by using the spiritual narrative. The
spiritual addressed many of the same themes of slave narratives, but has been largely
ignored in current scholarly conversation.[2]
At the turn of the 20th century, non-fiction works by authors such as W. E. B. Du
Bois and Booker T. Washington debated how to confront racism in the United States.
During the Civil Rights Movement, authors such as Richard Wright and Gwendolyn
Brooks wrote about issues of racial segregation and black nationalism. Today, African-
American literature has become accepted as an integral part of American literature,
with books such as Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, The Color
Purple (1982) by Alice Walker, which won the Pulitzer Prize; and Beloved by Toni
Morrison achieving both best-selling and award-winning status.
In broad terms, African-American literature can be defined as writings by people of
African descent living in the United States. It is highly varied.[3] African-American
literature has generally focused on the role of African Americans within the larger
American society and what it means to be an American.[4] As Princeton
University professor Albert J. Raboteau has said, all African-American study "speaks to
the deeper meaning of the African-American presence in this nation. This presence
has always been a test case of the nation's claims to freedom, democracy, equality,
the inclusiveness of all."[4] African-American literature explores the issues of freedom
and equality long denied to Blacks in the United States, along with further themes such
as African-American culture, racism, religion, slavery, a sense of home,[5] segregation,
migration, feminism, and more. African-American literature presents experience from
an African-American point of view. In the early Republic, African-American literature
represented a way for free blacks to negotiate their identity in an individualized
republic. They often tried to exercise their political and social autonomy in the face of
resistance from the white public.[6] Thus, an early theme of African-American literature
was, like other American writings, what it meant to be a citizen in post-Revolutionary
America.
Characteristics and themes
African-American literature has both been influenced by the great African
diasporic heritage[7] and shaped it in many countries. It has been created within the
larger realm of post-colonial literature, although scholars distinguish between the two,
saying that "African American literature differs from most post-colonial literature in that
it is written by members of a minority community who reside within a nation of vast
wealth and economic power."[8]
African-American oral culture is rich in poetry, including spirituals, gospel music, blues,
and rap. This oral poetry also appears in the African-American tradition of
Christian sermons, which make use of deliberate repetition, cadence, and alliteration.
African-American literature—especially written poetry, but also prose—has a strong
tradition of incorporating all of these forms of oral poetry.[9] These characteristics do not
occur in all works by African-American writers.
Some scholars resist using Western literary theory to analyze African-American
literature. As the Harvard literary scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said, "My desire has
been to allow the black tradition to speak for itself about its nature and various
functions, rather than to read it, or analyze it, in terms of literary theories borrowed
whole from other traditions, appropriated from without."[10] One trope common to
African-American literature is "signifying". Gates claims that signifying “is a trope in
which are subsumed several other rhetorical tropes,
including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyperbole and litotes,
and metalepsis.”[11]Signifying also refers to the way in which African-American "authors
read and critique other African American texts in an act of rhetorical self-definition".[12]

Explain the poem "I, Too," by Langston Hughes.

Langston Hughes wrote the poem “I, Too,” forty-five years before Dr. Martin Luther
King spoke the words: “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their
character.”

The poem was published in 1925. Hughes wrote about the frustrations of the black
man in his poetry. He never gave up because he envisioned an America in which
black and white men would eat at the same table and be considered equal Americans.

The setting of the poem is “everywhere America” that believed that black men were
not Americans or equal to the white men as human beings.

The narration is first person with the poet as the narrator. Hughes was considered the
foremost of the Harlem Renaissance poets. When he wrote or spoke, the black man
listened because what Hughes said was exactly what the black man felt. The poem is
told in the present tense.
The form of the poem is free verse. It is written in five brief stanzas. The sentences
are short and conversational in fluidity, yet the tone is strong.

1st stanza

The title of the poem is a reference to the poem by Walt Whitman titled “I Hear America
Singing.” Hughes’ poem enhances the idea that “Hey, wait a minute, I too am an
American. I can sing also." I am an American. I was born in America and so were my
parents. Just because I am Black does not take away my patriotism or love for my
country.

2nd stanza

Hughes refers to the black man metaphorically as “the darker brother.” All Americans
have something in common: their heritage. Unfortunately in the time that Hughes was
writing, the black man was not considered an equal in any respect. He was not
allowed to use the same restrooms, water fountains, or eat at the fountain bar in the
drug store. In the home where he worked as a servant, handy man, or chauffeur, he
was expected to eat in the kitchen with the rest of the help.

“I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes…”

The black man goes on, laughs, eats his dinner, and grows stronger. This statement
implies that the “Negroes” were biding their time. Living their lives and growing tough
as an ethnic group led the way to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

3rd stanza

Hughes perceives a tomorrow in America where the black man will be welcome to eat
at the table with everyone else. He will dare not ask him to sit at the table.

The implication of the word dare is threatening because the black Americans will
assert themselves as equal at some point in the future; consequently, because of their
power, they will not stand for anymore degradation.

4th stanza

The beauty of the black man is not just the outward appearance. It is the quality of his
character. To Hughes and black Americans, the only difference between the white
man and the black man was the color of the skin—not his intelligence, his personality,
his character, or anything else. If given the same freedom and equality, the black man
would rise above his circumstances just as the white man has.

5th stanza

To reinforce his idea, the poet ends with the impetus of the entire poem: “I, too, am
America.” What a powerful statement for a black man in the era in which it was
written! Hughes convincingly proves with his wonderful expression and creativity that it
took too long for the black man to be accepted as an authentic American.

What is the tone of "I, Too, Sing America" by Langston Hughes?

The tone of the poem is pride and defiance. It speaks of a racial divide in America that
white people are perfectly content to ignore. Sending the speaker to the kitchen to eat
can be symbolic of segregation, but also of America's desire to ignore the race
problem. Kind of like out of sight and out of mind.

Despite the poor treatment of black people, Hughes states that they will overcome and
"grow strong." He envisions a future where his people will rise up and demand full
equality. By suggesting he is a "brother," demonstrates an equal relationship. The
belief that black people will work to secure their rights against all odds is best exhibited
in the following passage:

But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

The inclusion of "I laugh," is an example of defiance as a theme. Despite whatever

unfair treatment he is subjected to, he will not let it break his spirit. Hughes also says
that America will be ashamed of its past treatment of black people which is also
somewhat defiant.

Poetry Analysis of the poem “I, Too” by Langston Hughes Essay

Essay Topic: Literature, Poetry
The poem I, Too, written by Langston Hughes, uses excellent language, vivid imagery
and strong sounds to express the poet’s feelings towards racism. I, Too is an anti-
discrimination poem, which shows the injustice of racism. The poem is very effective
because of its genuine emotions.
The poem is situated in America and describes a black man’s personal experience with
racial discrimination. He is treated as if he is an embarrassment to the white people, and
made to feel inferior to them.
The poet is trying to show how America “covers up” her racial discrimination “problems.”
He also wants to convey the importance of racial equality. He wants the reader to
understand that this is not just a personal experience, but a voice of his people.
The tone changes throughout the poem. In the first line, the tone is patriotic. The line, “I,
too, sing America,” indicates the national anthem, and symbolizes unity throughout the
nation. In the next stanza, the tone is of anger and strength. The man is enraged at how
he is treated, but he knows he is strong enough to fight back. This is shown in the line,
“But I laugh,/ and eat well,/ And grow strong.” The following stanza’s tone is of warning
and caution. The man warns the people, that he will become powerful, and that no one
will dare to harm him in the future. Then in the next stanza, the tone changes once again.
The man is much calmer and speaks proudly that one day “they’ll see how beautiful I
am/ And be ashamed.” In the last line, the tone is once again patriotic.
The poem’s structure is irregular. The poem begins and ends with single lines. In
between there are 3 stanzas, all of which have different number of lines-6, 7 and 3. The
purpose for the irregular structure is to create an effect of unequalness, symbolizing the
discrimination he is receiving.
The poem’s use of simple language helps to clearly define what the poet wants to
express. The saying that “strong people don’t waste words,” is shown here, as the poem
is short and to the point. It could also reflect the uneducated class, or the clarity and
simplicity of their just complaint. The poem is also made more effective by using words
with deeper meanings. For example, the word, “brother,” means family and symbolizes
equality and acceptance. Another example, “sit at the table,” has its literal meaning, and
also a second meaning, indicating politics and being involved in making decisions. The
fact that the poem is short and simple but can express so much meaning shows how the
diction of this poem adds to its effectiveness.
Likewise, the use of imagery in this poem adds to the poem’s effectiveness. The poet
uses a lot of domestic images. The reader can picture the large house of a wealthy
family, the kitchen- the servant’s quarters- and the dining room. The poem also contains
a few metaphors and symbols. Metaphors and symbols are used because they say what
we want to say, more vividly and forcefully. In the line, “I am the darker brother,” the
person is comparing himself to a family member. It is clear that he is not part of his
employer’s family, but here the word “brother” symbolizes equality and acceptance into
a society.
An example of symbolism used in this poem is seen in the line, “They send me to eat in
the kitchen when company comes.” It has two meanings. The literal meaning means the
employers send him away when guests arrive. The other meaning means America trying
to conceal her racial “problems” to show the world a different image of the country.
Another example is “I’ll sit at the table.” The literal meaning just means to sit at a table,
but it also symbolizes being in charge and making decisions. These comparisons and
symbols illustrate the point so well that they increase the effectiveness of the poem.
The poem is of irregular rhythm as it is more effective this way. A steady rhythm would
make the poem sound as if life was going along smoothly- not the effect the poet wanted.
Instead, its irregular rhythm gives the poem a solemn feeling. This rhythm mirrors the
uneasy and unsteady social relationship between blacks and whites in America.
The poem contains a few examples of alliteration and repetition. The line “When
company comes,” is an example of alliteration and repetition. The consonant “c” is
repeated twice in the line, emphasizing the words, especially “company.” The alliteration
and repetition of the line also stresses the theme of the poem- that America is trying to
conceal her racial “problems” and show the world a different picture.
The poem “I, Too,” is a poem about discrimination. Through the unjust actions done to
the man, the reader is shown how unequal privilege and decision making power is in
American society. However, also through the man’s strength and bravery, the reader
can see hope in the world- hope that one day, all people will be equal. The poet’s use of
great imagery and sound helped to make this poem an effective anti-discrimination
poem.

The Segregated I - Analysis of I, Too by Langston Hughes

By Gary R. Hess. Category: Poetry Analysis
The poem "I, Too" by Langston Hughes is an excellent example of a poem using the
word "I" as something other than its literal meaning. "I, Too" is about the segregation of
African Americans, whites and how soon segregation will come to an end.
The first line of "I, Too" uses the word "I" right away. The line states "I, too, sing
America". This meter in particular is as important as the entirety of the poem. It means
not only whites are Americans, but African Americans are citizens and should be
treated equally.
In the following stanza, the word "I" is used several times. The first line of the second
stanza states "I am the darker brother" -- meaning he may be African American, but he
is still an American. The following five meters state "They send me to eat in the
kitchen. When company comes, but I laugh, and eat well, and grow strong". The use of
"I" here is showing that African Americans do not worry about what is being done, but
how they are growing stronger as segregation continues, knowing soon they will be
equal.
African Americans were not allowed to eat with whites. They generally were not
allowed to use the same entrances, exits, toilets, or the same room to eat in. This is
why they sent him to the kitchen to eat.
The third stanza shows what the future will be like, or as Hughes uses the
metaphorical "tomorrow." The stanza reads "Tomorrow, I'll be at the table when
company comes. Nobody'll dare say to me, "Eat in the kitchen," Then". The use of "I"
helps showing the African American community will soon rise and be one with the rest
of America.
The fourth stanza concludes in a way which states African Americans are not
inherently bad, but inherently good. The stanza reads "Besides, they'll see how
beautiful I am and be ashamed "I, too, am America". Here Hughes says that once
African American's are recognized as equal, everyone will see they are not bad and
that they are beautiful as well as part of America.
Langston Hughes is a talented poet who uses metaphors and his own style
of writing to increase the effectiveness of his overall message. His usage of "I" helps
reiterate that he too is an American and will not be let down by society nor will other
African Americans. "I, Too" depicts the view of African Americans in the past and their
strength to move forward.