'Harlem': A Dream In Harlem By Langston Hughes

Jazz music filled the streets, people poured into speakeasies, the economy boomed and American spirits were high during the roaring twenties. The Harlem Renaissance played an essential part in making this decade a notable time. Due to the great migration caused by Jim Crow laws, Boll Weevils and industrial jobs available in the North, African Americans finally left their lives of endless debt and farming for a new opportunities in the North. Harlem allowed the opportunity for a new African American culture to be represented. This new culture allowed for African Americans to be able to achieve new dreams. Authors like Langston Hughes captured the spirit of Harlem in his works. Although, the Harlem Renaissance was a time of literary, artistic

According to Hughes in the poem “Harlem”, Blacks postponing dreams could only have negative outcomes. “What happens to a dream deferred?... or does it explode?,” he describes along with a number of other dreadful possibilities that happen to unfulfilled dreams. The idea that society doesn 't want this new culture to be able to achieve their dreams, however, according to Hughes this was their time to achieve them is expressed in this piece. Even though society suppressed African Americans, society needed them to achieve these dreams. If African Americans did not achieve their dreams during the Harlem Renaissance we would not have many great celebrities we know today. Babe Ruth would not become a baseball legend, Louis Armstrong would not be one of the best musicians of the decade and Langston Hughes would not have been the inspiring writing he was. Without these African Americans who followed their dreams, like Hughes implied through disturbing imagery, society would have been extensively hurt. With the use of imagery, Hughes is able to get this idea across. In numerous negative outcomes, he directly states in vivid details all the horrendous things that will happen if these dreams are not achieved. This allows the reader to think of dreams as a physical object that needs to be tended to, like, as Hughes compares it to, a festering sore. In that case, along with Hughes’s many other examples, putting it off will only make it get worse. Undoubtedly, imagery successfully demonstrates the need for African Americans to achieve their