The Impact Of Langston Hughes On African-American Culture

Starting in 1918 and originating in Harlem, New York City, Harlem Renaissance is the intellectual revolution of the African-American community. The movement revived African-American music, art, dance, and literature, and laid the foundations of today’s black existence. Born in 1901, Langston Hughes describes the Harlem Renaissance as providing an opportunity for the African-American community to “express (their) individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.” One of the presiding reasons Hughes became a cultural reset is how he was inspired by his own experiences while composing his work. In a timeline in which the African-American community was widely mistreated, his people saw their own pain in his work, people of different ethnicities

Furthermore, his deep affiliation with political events of his time and presence as a vocal advocate for Civil Rights and social justice led him to often address these issues directly in his work. The experiences and stance of Hughes shaped his work in a way that created a brand new point of view that could only be understood if the reader knew about his background. The peculiar way Langston Hughes commits to paper on account of his personal experiences relating to racial prejudice successfully represents the struggles of the African-American community.

Hughes depicts that America appears to be unified solely by counting each individual as worthy of recognition through a poem published during his time of figurative imprisonment. To clarify, In 1924, during his visit to Genoa, Italy, Hughes’ passport and wallet

First and foremost, Hughes wrote “The Negro Speaks the Rivers” while crossing the Missisipi River to visit his estranged father at the age of 17. The observation is his inspiration of resembling his soul to a river. The simile aims to illustrate the flow of water in a river to the flow of the blood in the African-American community’s veins. Therefore, the symbolism of river and blood is to illustrate the African-American existence to the world. For instance, the Euphrates, as mentioned in the 4th line, is the birthplace of all civilizations, therefore the rhetorical beginning of humanity. Through the phrase “I bathed in the Euphrates when nights were young”, Hughes illustrates that the black existence stands to the very beginning. Furthermore, the line ““I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it” is an enonym to the lost black lives whilst building the pyramids for the pharaohs, further communicating the contribution of the black community to the world history, which is neglected in the history narrated by white imperialists. The climax is reached when a reference is made to Abraham Lincoln’s visit to the Mississippi River when he observed the hidden face of slavery that led him to ban slavery during his presidency. This illustrates the idea that the black existence is never to