Considering History: Langston Hughes and the Patriotism of Black History Month

This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.

Among the dozens of Executive Orders released by the Trump White House in its first two weeks is a recent one entitled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” While this Executive Order seeks to address a number of perceived issues, including ending support for transgender youth and reestablishing Trump’s 1776 Commission, at its heart this EO creates an explicit contrast: between “Patriotic Education” on the one hand and “DEI” (defined here as “discriminatory equity ideology”) on the other. That perspective likewise has informed many other newly announced policies, such as the decision to end Black History Month commemorations in a number of federal agencies.

As we begin this most fraught Black History Month, I would argue that our foundational diversity overall, and Black history specifically, are the source of much of what has been most patriotic in American history. I’ve made that case in a number of prior Considering History columns, including one on MLK’s critical patriotism and another on enslaved patriots during the Revolutionary period. Here I want to focus on a handful of beautiful, inspiring, and patriotic poems from one of our greatest American writers, Langston Hughes (1901-1967)

Hughes published his first poem when he was not yet 20 (“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which appeared in the NAACP magazine The Crisis in 1921), and released his first collection, The Weary Blues (1926), at the age of 25. At this very young age he was already prodigiously talented and often wise beyond his years, but he also expressed a youthful, stubborn, admirable resilience and optimism in the face of painful American realities. We see that perspective most clearly in the moving short poem “I, Too,” which opens “I, too, sing America,” ends “I, too, am America,” and in between offers a stirring challenge to segregation and racism. “Besides,” Hughes’s confident speaker notes, “They’ll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed.” This poem sings America not by eliding its hardest histories, but by recognizing that they cannot compete with its most beautiful identities and communities — such as those of “the darker brother” who speaks this poem’s truths.

Over his decades of writing and life Hughes experienced a great deal of the worst and best of America, and it unquestionably challenged and expanded his critical patriotic perspective. In a trio of 1940s poems, for example, he uses iconic American images and ideals as metaphors for the ongoing struggle to make a more perfect union for all Americans:

• In “Freedom’s Plow” (1943), Hughes creates an extended metaphor of working with the land to make the case for an America that belongs equally to all who are part of it. “America!/Land created in common/Dream nourished in common/Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!…The plan and the pattern is here/Woven from the beginning/Into the warp and woof of America:/ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL./NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH/TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN/WITHOUT HIS CONSENT./BETTER DIE FREE/THAN TO LIVE SLAVES./Who said those things? Americans!/Who owns those words? Americans!/Who is America? You, me!/We are America!”
• In “Freedom Train” (1947), Hughes contrasts realities of segregated train cars with the titular ideal vehicle, a train that the speaker has long heard of but needs to experience for himself so that he can fully believe in the ideals it carries and represents. And in the poem’s final lines he links that ideal to the World War II service of all Americans: “There won’t be no kinda color lines/The Freedom Train will be yours/And mine./Then maybe from their graves in Anzio/Black men and white will say, We want it so!/Black men and white will say, Ain’t it fine!/At home they got a Freedom Train/A Freedom Train/That’s yours and mine!”
• In “Democracy” (1949), Hughes begins with a recognition of the distressing current state of affairs for that American ideal: “Democracy will not come/Today, this year/Nor ever/Through compromise and fear.” But he pushes back with an argument for his and his people’s equal right to that ideal: “I have as much right/As the other fellow has/To stand/On my two feet/And own the land.” And he ends with a powerful pair of stanzas about both the ideal and the community: “Freedom/Is a strong seed/Planted/In a great need.” “I live here, too./I want freedom/Just as you.”

In all of these and many more poems, Hughes uses his writing to imagine and fight for a more shared and just future. But no Hughes poem, nor any other American literary work with which I’m familiar, more fully embodies a critical patriotic perspective than does his magisterial poem “Let America Be America Again” (1936), originally published in Esquire magazine’s July 1936 issue and then collected in Hughes’s book A New Song (1938).

“Let America Be America Again” begins with a dialogue between idealized national imagery and grievous national realities, the latter expressed in parenthetical responses to the former, that perfectly embodies the “critical” layer of critical patriotism:

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

 

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by any one above.

(It never was America to me.)

 

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,

Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

And after a series of stanzas that examines in depth both the nation’s difficult history and its ongoing if unfulfilled promises, Hughes returns to but revises this opening dialogue, in a pair of stanzas that expresses his full critical patriotic perspective:

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

 

O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath—

America will be!