Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of Black literature, music, and art centered in New York City through the 1920s and 1930s, grew partly out of the Great Migration -- the movement of millions of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities in the early 20th century, seeking economic opportunity and escaping the South's Jim Crow segregation laws. Langston Hughes became one of its most celebrated voices, writing poetry that combined accessible, musical language with real historical and political weight.

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921) collapses thousands of years of human history into a single, continuous personal memory: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers," the speaker says, naming the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile, and the Mississippi in turn -- an ancestral rootedness claimed as a source of dignity and full belonging, reaching back further than the nation itself. "I, Too" (1926) answers Walt Whitman directly: its opening line, "I, too, sing America," deliberately echoes Whitman's own inclusive vision from Week 21, describing being sent to eat in the kitchen when company comes, but predicting a future at the table as an equal -- "They'll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed." Where Whitman's catalog claimed to already include everyone, Hughes's poem shows that the promise was not yet fulfilled, and claims, with confidence rather than bitterness, that it will be.