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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2004Black/Red ViewKerry misquotes Hughesby John Alan John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, in his ongoing campaign to defeat President Bush, recently quoted lines from Langston Hughes poem "Let America Be America Again." Kerry was careful in selecting his quotes, avoiding their contextual meaning. Kerry quoted:
He didn’t finish the quote, which went on to say: "There has never been equality for me, in this ‘homeland of the free.’" Any reading of Hughes’ "Let America Be America Again" would at once reveal that Hughes was saying that African Americans and many others were still struggling for their freedom in America. In Hughes' words:
There is a relationship between Hughes’ poem and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. First, there would not have been a Harlem Renaissance if the masses of African Americans had not left the humiliations and the terrorism of southern racism and migrated to northern cities and created large viable communities like Harlem in New York City. Second, Harlem at that time attracted many people from the West Indies. One of them was Claude McKay of Jamaica. McKay defiantly challenged the violence of America’s racism. In one of his poems he wrote:
McKay was announcing in 1919 that a new generation of African Americans would no longer allow themselves to be murdered by white mobs and were, subjectively and objectively, strong enough to engage in major struggles against racism in this nation. The origin of their powerful opposition to this racist terrorism was the idea of freedom, which had organized the great migration out of the South to the urban North. As Hegel said: "Freedom alone is the purpose which realizes and fulfills itself, the only enduring pole in the change of events and conditions, the only truly efficient principle that pervades the whole." In their struggle for freedom, African Americans were engaged in finding their own self-consciousness. PERIOD OF SELF-DISCOVERY The Harlem Renaissance has been called a period of "Negro self-discovery.’" Hughes saw in the process of this "self-discovery" an alienating social relationship when he came to New York in 1921 to enter Columbia College as a freshman with a secret intention of going to Harlem. He saw the "Negro Renaissance in full swing." Writers were writing, dancers were swaying, Louis Armstrong was playing and Alain Locke’s book THE NEW NEGRO was about to be published. During this glorious time when African Americans were engaged in their "self-discovery," the young Hughes soon learned that Harlem did not run itself, nor did African Americans own any of the famous night clubs or theaters. They were all owned by whites. And, because at that time African culture was in vogue, white people were going to Harlem in droves and filling expensive night clubs to hear "Negro Jazz." Many of those clubs catered to white patrons exclusively. Hughes "soon learned that it was seemingly impossible for blacks to live in Harlem without white downtown pulling the strings." He thought that the Harlem Renaissance's writers and artists should choose as their main subjects "the low down folks, the so-called common element," because they form "the majority of the people in Harlem" ("The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," THE NATION, 1926). DEAFNESS TO CRY FOR FREEDOM The division between upper and lower class African Americans created a rocky road for him. Yet "we younger Negro artists now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If the colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure don’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong, as we know how and stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves." Kerry can only hear in Hughes’ poem the tom-tom laugh without hearing it cry at the same time. This has been a cry for every generation of African Americans since the white founders of the U.S. agreed to write a compromise in the Constitution of 1789 to keep African Americans in slavery. All the social manifestations of racism spawned by that compromise kept African Americans busy in a long historic struggle for freedom. The Harlem Renaissance was a creation of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South. Those new African Americans wanted to make a new beginning both in actuality and in thought, that is, to negate the old practices of racism and to experience living in a society where they were equal and free. Langston Hughes through his poems spoke to the deepest layers of that population who will continue to deepen the idea of freedom beyond party politics. |
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