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Alike Frederick Douglass Let America Be America Again

3253 Words14 Pages

The personal and social politics of racial identity in America are extremely complex as there are many intersections to the African American experience through history. I will be exploring these nuances through poems from the Harlem Renaissance including, ‘Heritage’ by Gwendolyn Bennett, ‘Bottled’ by Helen Johnson and ‘Let America be America Again’ by Langston Hughes. Exploring these poems will allow me to contextualise them with the wider Harlem Renaissance and with the position of Black people in America at the time, I will also explore this using Frederick Douglass’ ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass’ giving a breadth of time to explore the African American experience with its similarities and differences in how white America perceives …show more content…

In ‘Let America be America Again’ published in 1936, he calls for America to be known for the people that helped to create what it is today, rather than to be known for those that benefit from the people that made America what it is. The first three stanzas, read as though it is a speech that the speaker is reading aloud. This is shown through the minimal use of enjambment in the first stanza and the repetition of the verb ‘let’ at the beginning of most lines in the first stanza, for example, ‘Let it be the dream it used to be| Let it be the pioneer on the plain.’ However, between these first three stanza’s, Hughes writes the speakers inner thoughts in parentheses saying, ‘America never was America to me’ and ‘It never was America to me’, splitting the poem into two sections of the speaker’s mind. He speaks of America as ideals in his speech, to mirror the intrigue of the American Dream that was sold to many, saying ‘opportunity is real and life is free, ‘Equality is in the air we breathe.’ These optimistic nouns of ‘opportunity’ and ‘equality’ matched with the atmosphere and imagery of freedom in the nouns ‘air’ and ‘life’ and verb ‘breathe’ simulate a limitless and liberty that modern America presents itself as, made to persuade people of a better life. Yet the speaker extinguishes these thoughts and makes the audience realise that this image of America is, in fact, just an ideal for

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