Langston Hughes Obstacles: Resilience and Persistence

Introduction

“Never give up on something that you can’t go a day without thinking” ~Winston Churchill. Throughout history, African Americans have been fighting for equality, for not being frowned upon, for freedom! This feeling of fighting for equal rights and freedom upraised in the African American community in the 1920s, a great time period better known as The Harlem Renaissance. At the same time, famous poets like Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman picked up their pens to describe the struggles of the protest.

The Struggles and Determination

During The Harlem Renaissance, numerous African Americans protested for freedom with a persistent will, which is portrayed in poems written by various poets of that era. The feeling of freedom and equality was flourishing in African American in the 1920s, and this time around, they were determined and committed to achieving their goals, as described by many poets of the era. A poem named Mother to Son, written by a very well-known poet of the 1920s, Langston Hughes, states that “Life for me ain’t been crystal clear, It had a splinter, And boards were torn up, And places with no carpet…But all the time, as I’ve been a-climbing on” (Hughes). Basically, Hughes, writing as a mother to her son, is saying that life for him has not been easy and that it has had numerous obstacles. He even goes ahead and says, “places with no carpet,” which indirectly creates a feeling of coldness and suffering.

Persistent Will and Collective Effort

This all portrays that African Americans during this period were really struggling and suffering. But then Hughes later goes and states that he has kept going and kept trying despite all the obstacles. This suggests that authors of that era, and the African American community as a whole, believed that no matter how many obstacles they had in their way, if they kept trying, they would achieve their rights. Other poets, such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, picked up pens as well to convey their irresistible hope of freedom through persistent struggles and protests. Sympathy, a poem by Dunbar, does an excellent job of portraying grit. In this poem, Dunbar talks about the feeling of captivity by using a caged bird as means of conveying his message.

In the first stanza, Dunbar contrasts the visceral experiences of nature that a free bird enjoys with the struggles of a caged bird. And then, he follows the second stanza by stating, “I know why the caged bird beats his wing, Till its blood is red in the cruel bars; For he must fly back to his perch and cling…And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars, And they pulse again with a keener sting”(Dunbar). In other words, Dunbar is essentially portraying how a caged bird keeps trying to break through the cage to fly in the open. To intensify the situation, Dunbar goes ahead and states that the bird keeps trying to escape the cage until its wings are red with blood. If he fails, he tries again, this time with more effort. Basically, indirectly this shows that in that time period, African Americans were in the same situation as the birds, they had no rights at all, and feelings of discrimination towards them were at their highest.

Conclusion

Consequently, just like the bird, African Americans kept fighting for their rights to freedom, they struggled just like the bird, but regardless, they kept trying with a persistent will, just as the bird did, again and again and again until they achieved their desired results. Both these poems, written by reputable poets of the 1920s, convey that African Americans and the poets of that period believed that if they kept trying with a persistent will, they could overcome all obstacles and achieve their rights.

References

1. “The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes” – Langston Hughes

2. “The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America” – Arnold Rampersad 

3. “Langston Hughes: A Biography” – Milton Meltzer

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