The Black Poet of The Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes was an important and well-known figure in the Harlem Renaissance, which occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. Hughes’ main influences were Paul Laurence Dunbar, Walt Whitman, and Carl Sandburg, all of whom wrote about the lives of African-Americans in the 1960s. Langston Hughes’ works mainly use uplifting words to empower minorities because of their mistreatment in America. Langston Hughes was born James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. His parents were James Nathaniel and Carrie Langston Hughes. In 1926 Hughes got The Weary Blues, his first book of poetry published by Knopf. In 1940 he began writing in a column in the Chicago Defender where he gained a lot of attention. Sadly, on May 22, 1967, Hughes died from prostate cancer (Gates and Appiah ix). Langston Hughes was a poet that often mentioned the lives of African-Americans that lived in the South in his poems. In the book Blackness and the Adventure of Western Civilization by George Kent , it was said that "[d]espite the difficulties, Langston Hughes chose to build his vision on the basis of the folk experience as it …show more content…
By saying this, Hughes is conveying that in the south black people are treated unfair and this affects their lives negatively. The child that he chose to narrate the poem felt weird to sit near a white person on the merry-go-round. Again, in "Merry-Go-Round", it was stated that "[w]here is the Jim Crow section" (Hughes 194). It was the norm for him and other minorities like himself to sit in a blacks only or colored only section. When the time came for him to integrate he simply asked, "[w]here's the horse/ For a kid that's black" (Hughes 194). This was the last line of the poem and the most important line because it summed up all of the thoughts that Hughes was trying to get