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Langston Hughes Harlem Analysis

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The 1920s was a revolutionary decade in the United States as it marked the beginning of an age of consumerism, lifestyle extravagance and the birth of modern African American music and literature. In the 1920s cities like Chicago and New York came into full bloom with the construction of skyscrapers and the migration of millions of African Americans from rural states to major American Cities. Neighborhoods like Harlem became the cultural and artistic epicenter of the decade and most importantly the heart of an intellectual, social and artistic explosion, the Harlem Renaissance.
Through this movement, African American music and African American literature became widely welcomed and enjoyed by Americans from different races and social classes. …show more content…

Through his poetry, he depicted the African American experience in a country that was still very segregated and race oriented. He drew attention to the joys and struggles the African American life entailed. His work was not only incredibly influential at the time but had a huge impact on the decades that were to come.

Langston Hughes’ poems and writings contributed directly to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in which thousands of protests were mounted with the goal to end legalized racial segregation and discrimination laws in the United States. His poem “Harlem” which will be analyzed below, inspired Martin Luther King, one of the most influential voices and leaders of the Civil Rights Movement to give his speech “I Have a Dream."

Langston Hughes also inspired other African American authors like Claude Mckay, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright to write about their own and others’ experiences on being African American from different perspectives and different …show more content…

Most of them were forced to make their living by working in the agricultural industry as part of the sharecropping system, which offered little in the way of economic opportunity and growth. On the verge of World War I the United States Government set forth its claims, instilled patriotism in African Americans soldiers and called upon African American civilians to devote their labor and earnings to the cause. According to Dirk Hoerder’s American Labor and Immigration History, 1877-1920s: Recent European Research, this gave African Americans a sense of unity with the white population and sense relevance and representation in the country. Due to the war shortage of labor a quarter million African Americans left their former slave states for the better social, political and economic conditions the North had to offer. For the first time since emancipation, they found themselves free to sell their labor on the open market for a decent and livable wage and they had the chance to vote in a real and decisive way. This influx of tens of thousands of African Americans into northern states is called the Great

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During the time of the Great Depression, African Americans struggled the most already being the poorest people in America, but this changed with The Second World War which brought jobs and more rights to African Americans. In Chapters 10 and 11 of the book Creating Black Americans: African-American History and its meanings, 1619 to the present by Nell Irvin Painter, the author outlines the struggle for African Americans during the Great Depression, and even after during the New Deal era, then shows how they came out of it and became more successful and powerful during The Second World War. The Great Depression started with the crash of the stock market, and led to 25% of all American workers losing their jobs, most of which were African Americans.

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Some of the significant subjects were music, literature, poem, and art. The poets Langston Hughes and Claude McKay were some of the most influential poets from the renaissance. The poems “The Harlem Dancer” by Claude McKay and “I, Too” by Langston Hughes will be used to compare and show how two poems form the same era could be similar yet different based on their subject, purpose, style, tone, and rhythm. “I, Too” creates the world where people are treated equally. With so much discrimination and segregation occurring in the 20th century, it was a world that people wished for.

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The African American community faced many hardships; some might say, even worse then those faced by the rest of America. They found it harder to get jobs, and were fired before the Caucasian workers. Additionally, most new deal reparations didn’t apply to African Americans, so they did not get the jobs administered by the state to the unemployed. In order to be able to cope, the African Americans made their own charities, and their leaders urged them to unite for civil rights. Along side them helping each other, the government also tried to improve the poverty in African American communities.

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The Power of Art ¨Trumpeter of Lenox and 7th / through Jesse B. Semple,/ you simply celebrated Blues and Bebop / and beling black before / it was considered hip.¨ (Wesley Boone). Although the poems ¨Long Live Langston¨ by Wesley Boone, and ¨The weary Blues¨ by Langston Hughes were written in different time periods and with different purposes, the poems show similarities such as using similar figurative language to express an idea, and differences such as communicating different themes. Here are some examples of the similarities and differences shown throughout the poems. To begin with, in the poems ¨Long Live Langston¨ by Wesley Boone, and ¨The Weary Blues¨ by Langston Hughes, the authors include similes in their work, which helps the reader understand the similarities between the poems.

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It allowed blacks to migrate to the North, integrate with whites, and work in factories, giving them a small, but effective financial base to advance civil rights movements, something they did not have in the past. This money could be used to allow blacks to take greater action in their community, expand organizations such as the NAACP, and spread their message to whites. New deal actions such as the agricultural adjustment acts destroyed sharecropping, and blacks moved to the North as a result. Political ideals and economic opportunity presented by World War 2 accelerated the black movement, gaining support from the white community and beginning to see some gains. Many more blacks migrated to the North and West, the steady financial base that began to build in WW1 grew multifold, and the NAACP grew 10x larger.

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Between 1910 and 1940 there was a bloom of black artistic expression this period of time was known as the Harlem Renaissance. This period of time had black culture everywhere from music, literature to stage performing and arts, this was only one of the great migrations pros. With all

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The Harlem Renaissance was a period in American history, which occurred in the 1920s in Harlem, New York. The cultural movement was an opportunity for African Americans to celebrate their heritage through intellectual and artistic works. Langston Hughes, a famous poet, was a product of the Harlem Renaissance. One notable piece of literature by Hughes is “Dream Deferred”. However, the discussion of African American culture isn’t limited to the 1920s.

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Freedom isn't an option because every time they tried to run they almost always got caught and beaten, they also weren't allowed to speak and had to keep working for lots of hours everyday non stop, their food was also very scarce. But one slave Harriet Tubman was a person of excellence. Harriet Tubman escaped the home she was held as a slave and from there she started helping other slaves escape and became the leader and worked in the underground railroad. She also worked in the military as a nurse and spy helping more than 700 slaves become free, some blacks worked in the war to help with fighting so that they could be free too. Some blacks were forced to work for the Confederacy and others helped the Union to help make slaves free, this helped the Union because they had more of the population to fight and therefore more were armed and more of the Confederacy died off.

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In fact, his poem called “Dream Deferred” was a major influence on Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. His poetry was the voice of the Harlem Renaissance, he encouraged people to make themselves heard. He once said “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.” (Langston Hughes), meaning that if you want to do something, do it, don’t let society bring you down. So the real question is, how did Langston Hughes get to a point of

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More than 200,000 African Americans were deployed to France during WW1. Their service stirred black pride and raised the African American community 's political and social expectations, even though it did little to improve race relations in the U.S. More of the country 's racial demographics changed considerably as a result of the war. New jobs in manufacturing and other industries, combined with a shortage of cheap European labor, translated into opportunities for African Americans in New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago and other northern side cities. Drawn by the potential for better pay and living conditions, approximately half a million southern black agricultures moved north from 1914 to 1920 in what is known as the Great Migration.

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The culture of most blacks was unwanted during this time. For this reason Hughes desired to make a change and illustrate such cultural identities in his poems. In doing this he caused a shift in ideas among all people. Although the change didn’t happen immediately it did eventually occur. With that said the African American people were given less of an opportunity at jobs, schooling, and most importantly culture.

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In conclusion what had made The Harlem Renaissance a renaissance was from the continuous hard work that many black artist have put in during this time. It had caused a culture bloom for blacks and whites alike. The Harlem Renaissance pushed for equality amongst the black community and have even come to influence modern day song and style. The people writing in this essay are only a very small handful from the people who had helped push for such a cultural

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The Harlem Renaissance was the cultural explosion that took place in Manhattan during the 1920’s and 30’s after World War I, peaking at 1928. It was here where African-American culture bursted into a flurry of nightclubs, speakeasies, community centers, cafes, publishing houses, and galleries. 1920-1930 was a party that lasted a decade, and Manhattan was the center of it. The Harlem Renaissance resulted in what came to be the Jazz Age and the blues, introducing musicians such as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong; all at the Cotton

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Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou were African Americans alive during the period in American history when minority groups were fighting hard for their rights and respect among the country. These two authors used their writing skill to shed light on how African Americans felt throughout this period of time, opening many people’s eyes to how the oppressed truly felt. The civil rights movement could have had an entirely different outcome if it weren’t outspoken individuals such as these two. In Hughes’s well known poem “I, Too,” Hughes talks about how the people that mistreat him will soon regret everything they’ve done and will realize the true potential of him and everyone like him.

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Langston Hughes was an American poem born in the early nineteen hundreds, who became known as the leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He published many poems that brought light to the life of people of color in the twentieth century. There are three poems that the speakers are used to portray three major themes of each poem. Racism, the American Dream, and Hopes are all the major themes that Hughes uses to highlight the average life of a person of color. Theme for English B,” “Harlem,” and “Let America Be America Again” were three of Hughes’s poems that was selected to underline the themes.

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