worked at the local paper mill during the day and as a janitor at the telephone company at night. In September, when the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture - the grand collection of everything horrible and beautiful about black America - opened in Washington, D.C., visitors were greeted inside with large graven letters on the wall reading: “I, too, am America,” the last line of his 1926 poem “I, too. Gates was born on September 16, 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia, a city surrounded by the Allegheny Mountains. Recent scholars believe that the use of the dream trope in many of Hughes' poems inspired Martin Luther King Jr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. He used the incredibly creative poetry of black language, blues and jazz to construct an Afro-American aesthetic that rarely has been surpassed.”īetween the height of the Harlem Renaissance in 1926 and the dawn of the Black Arts Movement in 1967, Hughes - who was also a social activist - wrote 16 books of poetry and more than a dozen works of nonfiction and children's books. Langston Hughes said that Negroes were creating art and literature as if their lives depended on it. Scholar Henry Louis Gates wrote that the genius of Hughes’ “deceptively simple” writing “lay in expressing black consciousness, interpreting to the people the beauty within themselves, and in raising the racial folk form to literary art.
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