Langston Hughes was an African American poet and author who joined other black artists to break literary barriers during the civil rights movement. The poem entitled "Theme for English B" was written thirty years or so after the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, but still embodies why the Renaissance had originated in the first place. I believe this poem reflected on Hughes' life in general, but more importantly on the fight against the ignorance that created discrimination. James Mercer Langston
Travel back in time several centuries ago to the 1900’s and imagine how different life would be – oil lamps/candles, outhouses or one toilet shared between several people, movies known as “flickers” and lasting no longer than 10 minutes, no television, ice boxes as opposed to refrigerators, baseball being the main sport that people followed as opposed to football, and unless you were a White male, your lifestyle was not filled with many opportunities or rights. With slavery being abolished not too
had begun a steady development just before the turn of the century. In the performing arts, black musical theater featured such accomplished artists as songwriter Bob Cole and composer J. Rosamond Johnson, brother of writer James Weldon Johnson. Jazz and blues music moved with black populations from the South and Midwest into the bars and cabarets of Harlem. In literature, the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt in the late 1890s were among the earliest works of African
Visions of “The Primitive” in Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea Recounting his experiences as a member of a skeleton crew in “The Haunted Ship” section of his autobiography The Big Sea (1940), Langston Hughes writes This rusty tub was towed up the Hudson to Jonas Point a few days after I boarded her and put at anchor with eighty or more other dead ships of a similar nature, and there we stayed all winter. ...[T]here were no visitors and I almost never went ashore. Those long winter nights