Remembering James Langston Hughes

 James Langston Hughes was the American Poet Laureate of Harlem.  He was born February 1, 1902 and died May 22, 1967.  

“I knew only the people I had grown up with…,” he once wrote.  Isn’t that true of all of us?  We only the know the people we grew up with, and who were they?   Did you grow up in a rural, urban, suburban area where only certain kinds of people surrounded you?  I did.  Hughes finished his sentence…”I knew only the people I had grown up with, and they weren’t people whose shoes were always shined, who had been to Harvard, or who had heard of Bach.”

My favorite Hughes poem is “Harlem.”  It goes like this:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

He wrote another poem that seems appropriate for today.  “I Dream a World” speaks to our time.

I dream a world where man

No other man will scorn,

Where love will bless the earth

And peace its paths adorn

I dream a world where all

Will know sweet freedom’s way,

Where greed no longer saps the soul

Nor avarice blights our day.

A world I dream where black or white, 

Whatever race you be,

Will share the bounties of the earth

And every man is free,

Where wretchedness will hang its head

And joy, like a pearl,

Attends the needs of all mankind-

Of such I dream, my world!

If we cannot bring into being this kind of world, if the dream is deferred (as it has always been deferred) our world will dry up like a raisin in the sun…or it will fester like a sore…and stink like rotten meat…or explode!