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ACCORDING TO LIZ - A school assignment to read one of Langston Hughes’ poems was the first memory I have that others might experience the world differently than I did. A socio-economic experience far more removed from mine than color of skin.
Another – “Let America Be America Again,” written in 1935 and circulated by my state senator for Independence Day in very white Vermont, is undeniably relevant to the world we live in today.
Hughes was a humanist and a polymath in an era still rife with discrimination – poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, columnist, and an early innovator of jazz poetry, but best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.
He was born of a complex lineage; his paternal great-grandmothers were enslaved Africans, and paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners, one reportedly related to statesman Henry Clay of the Missouri Compromise infamy. His maternal grandmother came from African, French, English and Native American stock and married a mixed-race man killed in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.
Another Hughes poem contains the lines:
“I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom's way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free."
Hughes and the rising black consciousness held different goals than the colored middle-class of the early decades of the twentieth century. He wrote what might be their manifesto, published in 1926 in The Nation:
“The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs.
“If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.”
Echoes of both reverberated through time and space, reappearing in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the culmination of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Not so surprising in that the men were in covert communication for decades.
Covert because Hughes had been tarred by Joseph McCarthy with the Communist brush, and for MLK’s civil rights mission to succeed in the face of constant establishment smears, they couldn’t be seen as associate’s in public. A fate also shared by two other King mentors, Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison.
Despite being scorned by contemporaries as out of date and a chauvinist at a time when racial integration was increasing, Hughes was far more famous worldwide in the 50s than the protégé who came to eclipse him before MLK’s assassination.
Much of Hughes’ oeuvre lives on in King’s writing and speeches, giving new life to words and imagery that the J. Edgar Hoover-McCarthy cabal thought they had forever silenced.
In contrast to the Black Power movement of the 1960s, Hughes raised a broader racial consciousness embracing the African diaspora and championing a cultural autonomy free from anger and hate. Through his words, Hughes sought to unite people of African descent and Africa around the world to celebrate their diversity and differences.
And unite them with other, American, victims of economic injustice championed by MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign.
Let America Be America Again
By Langston Hughes
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
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.
(It never was America to me.)
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.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
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.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
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.
The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
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!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
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 great green states—
And make America again!
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
