I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. One of his first published poems is still one of his best-known, and helped kickstart the Harlem Renaissance: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, in which Hughes asserts a personal connection to the legendary rivers of Africa: Hughes helped kindle a positive consciousness of African heritage. Langston Hughes learned early that language can transcend suffering in his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea he recalled that “books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books-where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.” He also believed in taking pride in African American culture and the Black aesthetic, finding struggle, laughter, and joy in all its walks of life. In sonnets and anthems, odes and epics, Black poets in the Americas confronted violence and indifference, legal barriers to reading and writing, illegal suppression of voting rights, and outright threats to their personhood, livelihood, and neighborhoods…For American Americans, the very act of composing poetry proves a form of protest.” They wrote about what they saw around them and also what they dreamed up-even if it was a dream deferred, derailed or flat-out denied. “For more than 250 years, African Americans have written and recited and published poetry about beauty and injustice, music and muses, Africa and America, freedoms and foodways, Harlem and history, funk and opera, boredom and longing, jazz and joy. Young recently edited the landmark anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, which definitively presents its full, dazzling scope and illuminates its centrality to American literature. For this and other reasons including their shared love of jazz, Young feels an affinity for Hughes, and writes about him in To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor and in Brown, a poetic reflection on his Midwest childhood. African American History Month begins today on February 1 we also celebrate the birthday of Langston Hughes, one of the most powerful voices in American poetry.īoth Langston Hughes and Kevin Young, also an acclaimed poet as well as incoming director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, grew up in towns around the Midwest and spent formative years in Kansas.

Kevin young brown poems