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Langston Hughes

(1901-1967) American writer and social activist

Langston Hughes (1 February 1902 – 22 May 1967) was an American poet, novelist, playwright, social activist and newspaper columnist.

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Quotes

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I, too, sing America.
 
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
 
Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.
  • I, too, sing America.
    I am the darker brother.
    They send me to eat in the kitchen
    When company comes,
    But I laugh,
    And eat well,
    And grow strong.
    • "I, Too", in the magazine Survey Graphic (March 1925); reprinted in Selected Poems (1959); it is also often referred to as "I, Too, Sing America"
  • They'll see how beautiful I am
    And be ashamed —
    I, too, am America.
    • "I, Too", in the magazine Survey Graphic (March 1925); reprinted in Selected Poems (1959)
  • The night is beautiful,
    So are the faces of my people.
    • "My People", in the magazine Poems in Crisis (October 1923); reprinted in The Weary Blues (1926)
  • I've known rivers:
    Ancient, dusky rivers.
    My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
    • "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", The Weary Blues (1926)
  • The stars went out and so did the moon.
    The singer stopped playing and went to bed
    While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
    He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
  • Way Down South in Dixie
    (Break the heart of me)
    They hung my black young lover
    To a cross roads tree.
    • "Song for a Dark Girl" (l. 1-4), from Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)
  • Love is a naked shadow
    On a gnarled and naked tree.
    • "Song for a Dark Girl" (l. 11-12), from Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)
  • While over Alabama earth
    These words are gently spoken:
    Serve — and hate will die unborn.
    Love — and chains are broken.
    • "Alabama Earth (at Booker Washington's grave)," from the anthology Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers (1941), ed. Arna Bontemps
  • Hold fast to dreams
    For if dreams die
    Life is a broken-winged bird
    That cannot fly.
    • "Dreams," from the anthology Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers, ed. Arna Bontemps (1941)
  • I was so sick last night I
    Didn't hardly know my mind.
    So sick last night I
    Didn't know my mind.
    I drunk some bad licker that
    Almost made me blind.
    • "Morning After," (l. 1-6), from Shakespeare in Harlem (1942)
  • I swear to the Lord
    I still can't see
    Why Democracy means
    Everybody but me.
    • "The Black Man Speaks," from Jim Crow's Last Stand (1943)
  • Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.
  • If I were marooned on a desert island...I would miss...Jackie Ormes's cute drawings
    • Goldstein, Nancy, Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist (2008)

"Let America Be America Again" (1935)

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Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Written in 1935; first published in Esquire (1936); also in A New Song (1938) · Full text online · "Let America Be America Again" full recitation at YouTube
 
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
 
O, let America be America again —
The land that never has been yet —
And yet must be — the land where every man is free.
  • Let America be America again.
    Let it be the dream it used to be.
  • Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed —
    Let it be that great strong land of love
    Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
    That any man be crushed by one above.
  • I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
    I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
    I am the red man driven from the land,
    I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek —
    And finding only the same old stupid plan
    Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
  • For all the dreams we've dreamed
    And all the songs we've sung
    And all the hopes we've held
    And all the flags we've hung,
    The millions who have nothing for our pay —
    Except the dream that's almost dead today.
  • O, let America be America again —
    The land that never has been yet —
    And yet must be — the land where every man is free.
  • Sure, call me any ugly name you choose —
    The steel of freedom does not stain.
    From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
    We must take back our land again,
    America!
  • O, yes,
    I say it plain,
    America never was America to me,
    And yet I swear this oath —
    America will be!

The Big Sea (1940)

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  • You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word “Negro” is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black. I am brown. My father was a darker brown. My mother an olive-yellow.
    • The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, V. 13, The Big Sea (2002), p. 36
  • For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.

Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)

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My motto,
As I live and learn,
is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.
 

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?

 
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me —
  • My motto,
    As I live and learn,
    is:
    Dig And Be Dug
    In Return.
    • "Motto"
  • When you turn the corner
    And you run into yourself
    Then you know that you have turned
    All the corners that are left.
    • "Final Curve"
  • Good evening, daddy
    I know you’ve heard
    The boogie-woogie rumble
    Of a dream deferred
    • "Boogie: 1 a.m."
  • Why should it be my loneliness,
    Why should it be my song,
    Why should it be my dream
    deferred
    overlong?
    • "Tell Me"
  • What happens
    to a dream deferred?
    Daddy, ain’t you heard?
    • "Good Morning"

  • What happens to a dream deferred?

    Does it dry up
    like a raisin in the sun?
    Or fester like a sore —
    And then run?
    Does it stink like rotten meat?
    Or crust and sugar over —
    like a syrupy sweet?

    Maybe it just sags
    like a heavy load.

    Or does it explode?

    • "Harlem"
  • There’s a certain
    amount of traveling
    in a dream deferred.
    • "Same in Blues"
  • A certain amount
    of nothing
    in a dream deferred.
    • "Same in Blues"
  • Daddy, daddy, daddy,
    All I want is you.
    You can have me, baby —
    but my lovin’ days is through.
    A certain amount
    of impotence
    in a dream deferred.
    • "Same in Blues"
  • You talk like they
    don’t kick dreams
    around downtown.
    • "Comment on Curb"
  • I tire so of hearing people say,
    Let things take their course.
    Tomorrow is another day.
    I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
    I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.
Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.
I live here, too.
  • "Democracy"
  • Dream within a dream,
    Our dream deferred.
    Good morning, daddy!
    Ain’t you heard?
    • "Island"

  • The instructor said,

    Go home and write
    a page tonight.
    And let that page come out of you —
    Then, it will be true.

    • "Theme from English B"
  • It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me
    at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
    I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you.
    • "Theme from English B"
  • Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
    I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
    I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
    or records — Bessie, bop, or Bach.
    I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
    the same things other folks like who are other races.
    • "Theme from English B"
  • You are white —
    yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
    That’s American.
    Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
    Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
    But we are, that’s true!
    As I learn from you,
    I guess you learn from me —
    although you’re older — and white —
    and somewhat more free.
    • "Theme from English B"

Quotes about Langston Hughes

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  • Langston Hughes' poem, "I've Known Rivers," became the rallying cry for black Americans to take pride in their color, the reverberations of that attitude reached the Africans in the then French and British colonies.
  • [T]here have not been that many black artists that visible for black youth. There was Langston Hughes, but he was the only one and that was thirty-five to forty years ago. And men of the Negro Renaissance were not given to get outside of Harlem, really.
    • From a 1977 interview in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)
  • I was always interested in fair play, probably from reading the works of Paul Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Charles Dickens as a child. I was always concerned about justice and injustice. To the extent that I could understand the issues, I was always on the side of the underdog. I'm on the same side today.
    • From a 1977 interview in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)
  • Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts-and depressed that he has done so little with them…Hughes, in his sermons, blues and prayers, has working for him the power and the beat of Negro speech and Negro music. Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand-or sleight-of-hand-by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary-without the faintest notion of what it really means the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience. Hughes knows the bitter truth behind these hieroglyphics: what they are designed to protect, what they are designed to convey. But he has not forced them into the realm of art where their meaning would become clear and overwhelming. "Hey, pop!/Re-bop!/Mop!" conveys much more on Lenox Avenue than it does in this book, which is not the way it ought to be. Hughes is an American Negro poet and has no choice but to be acutely aware of it. He is not the first American Negro to find the war between his social and artistic responsibilities all but irreconcilable.
  • I did not read any Langston Hughes until I was an adult, but I remember being carried away by him and Gwendolyn Brooks.
  • (Strictly from the African American experience, in your opinion what language would be our mother tongue?) TCB: The language of Langston Hughes, the language of Grandma, the language of "mama say." Mama say don't let cha mouth get you into what, etc. etc.
    • From a 1980 interview in Thabiti Lewis (ed.) Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara (2017)
  • (At National Black Theater performance) I was in awe of the words I witnessed that day. It was the first time that I heard the works of writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka. I heard poetry that was about me, that was very immediate. I connected to it in a visceral way. That experience moved me so profoundly that I went home and that night I wrote my first batch of poems. It was like the floodgates opened. That reading empowered me with a voice and gave me permission to express everything that had been festering in me for years. So I just started experimenting with language and writing all kinds of things.
  • About the time I was 17 and graduated from high school, I like to say that I ran away from home. I went to Harlem, and that was a most beautiful place where, fortunately for me, I came into, or rather, ran into, the hands of some wonderful people; people who formed an important part of the so-called [[w:Harlem Renaissance|Black Renaissance. They were people like Langston Hughes, Wally Thurmond, Bud Fisher, all really wonderful writers.
  • My cartoon character Bootsie has been a part of that struggle for 39 years and I believe, as Langston Hughes did, that satire and humor can often make dents where sawed-off billiard sticks can't.
  • [T]he colored folks rolled in the aisles, laughin' and laughin'. And Brother Bootsie was right in there laughin' and gigglin' too... but he could never figure out why. And one night in the Harlem Moon over a few gins with gingerales Langston Hughes told Bootsie it was very simple. He was just laughin' to keep from cryin'.
  • He came after me. At the time, I was not published at all, in '61, '62. I was not a popular Black poet, because some of the things I said ran very counter to a line that was the line in Black poetry at the time. And there was a lot of sexism involved too in those days-not that there isn't now, but it was particularly then...I wasn't aware of it at the time, but I think it had a lot to do with it, that he was closeted.
    • From an interview in Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004)
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