Racial Inequality and Oppression in Langston Hughes' Poetry
- Janet Appleby
- 14 hours ago
- 4 min read
The following is an excerpt from our Study Companion for the Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, available on the resources page of our website.
Written at a time when racial segregation was systematic and discrimination a daily experience for Black Americans, racial inequality and oppression are central concerns of Langston Hughes’ poetry. Hughes’ poems frequently reflect the everyday African American experience, constructing both collective voices and individual personas to tell his stories. Through these, he presents racial oppression as pervasive, unjust and often harrowing, particularly through the evocative imagery he uses.
Hughes exposes the legacy of slavery in America and how it continues to shape the lives of African Americans. Honouring black oral storytelling tradition, one of his earliest poems, ‘Aunt Sue’s Stories’ (1921), shows the generational impact of slavery and the enduring suffering left in its wake. Hughes contrasts cosy imagery of present day “cuddles” during “summer nights on the porch” with the “dark shadows” of past slavery and conveys how oppression continues to intrude into seemingly still and safe black lives after emancipation. The stories the protagonist tells are many; the polysyndeton used to repeat “and black slaves” alludes to the vast number of slaves and their many experiences. The actions of the slaves, “working”, “walking”, “singing” suggests the physicality and monotony of their lives; however, Hughes does not include specific detail of suffering. Rather, the sibilance throughout the poem vocalises the gentleness of the story telling, appropriate for a child. This softens the harshness of the experiences when Aunt Sue recounts “slaves/ singing sorrow songs on the banks of a mighty river”. With a child as her audience, the exact sorrows they experienced are not explicated but implied as metaphoric “dark shadows that cross and recross” the stories. Through the anaphora of how the slaves “mingle themselves softly”, in Sue’s voice and these shadows, Hughes reveals that the aftermath of slavery is interwoven into African American lives in multifaceted ways. From the quantity and frequency of Sue’s stories, and her rhythmic telling, the child listening “knows” that Sue’s stories are authentic and “right out of her own life” and thus are more important than fiction, his “quiet” response to the story shows the gravity of the impact her stories create, intimating that he too will carry these stories with him.
Other poems linger on the violence towards and degradation of African Americans, particularly the poems in the ‘Magnolia Flowers’ collection. Confronting images of oppression are evident in ‘The South’, in which Hughes personifies the southern states of America to expose the landscape of African American lives. The poem presents “The South” as alluring but, ultimately, a place of atrophy for the Black American. The speaker admires the beauty of the south and Hughes uses asyndeton to extensively list its virtues, “cotton and the moon/warmth, earth, warmth/ the sky, the sun, the stars”, the elemental nature of such features suggests an idyllic environment, providing all one needs for life. However, for the speaker, it is a sinister place that is “lazy, laughing… with blood on its mouth”. Hughes begins the poem with these lines, vividly establishing the South’s vindictiveness, violence and insecurity. It is a place where the remnants of slavery continue to resurface because the South, and those who control it, continue to try to resurrect the past with continued racial segregation. Though slavery has been abolished (represented by a “dead fire”), they metaphorically “scratch in the dead fire’s ashes/For a Negro’s bones”: a jarring image that immediately conveys that there is no rest or peace to be found in such a place, despite its deceptive beauty.
In ‘Georgia Dusk’, Hughes also uses personification, as well as metaphor and simile, to explore the insidious racism in this southern state. The “Georgia dusk” itself symbolises the cumulative consequences of slavery. Hughes shows what remains at the day’s end is grief, suffering and hatred. The dusk brings with it a personified wind which grieves relentlessly with the repetition of “cries and cries and cries”, but it also “scatters hate like seed/ To sprout its bitter barriers / Where the sunsets bleed”. The divisiveness of segregation becomes the focal point of the poem, emphasizing how easily hatred escalates. The plosive sounds of the alliterated “bitter barriers… bleed” reinforce the resentment of these lines. Thus, Hughes somberly denounces the human cruelty that exists amidst the exquisite beauty of the South and the devastating legacy of slavery for African Americans as well as for the nation itself.
Hughes also reflects upon the exclusion and silencing that race imposes on African Americans. In ‘As I Grew Older’ Hughes creates an overwhelming image of dreams being silenced by the metaphoric “wall” that race creates. The speaker expresses how the “bright sun” of his dream is blocked out by a wall that rises “slowly, slowly” to disconnect the speaker. The epizeuxis of “slowly, slowly” evokes a persistently growing barrier threatening the speaker and its effect transitions from “dimming” to “hiding” the hope of the dream, until the wall reaches to the sky and only “shadow” remains. Hughes places a two-line stanza in the middle of his poem, with only four words, implying that the ideas within these lines are central to his message. The end-stopped word “shadow” as a single-sentence line creates a sense of stagnation that implies the loss of dreams is both permanent and immobilising. Followed by another short line, “I am black”, Hughes makes a clear connection between being black and living in shadow, the end stops suggesting that these are both fixed states, unlikely to change. Thus, the barrier created by race is one that seems both insurmountable and debilitating.
Hughes’ poetry illuminates slavery’s legacy and its continual impact on African American lives. He overtly criticises racial discrimination and mourns the violence and loss it creates while warning of its dismantling power. However, in writing of these experiences, he validates the experiences of African American readers of the Twentieth Century, giving voice to previously silent struggles and pain. Through such writing, Langston Hughes offers empowerment to readers to see themselves and their lives as worthy subjects of great writing.
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