SOURCE: Hernton, Calvin. “The Poetic Consciousness of Langston Hughes from Affirmation to Revolution.” Langston Hughes Review 12, no. 1 (spring 1993): 2-9.

In the following essay, Hernton examines the lesser-known “protest” poems of Langston Hughes.

The poetry of Langston Hughes is imbued with a consciousness of black people which has always awed and inspired me. In one of his earliest poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes articulated this abiding consciousness by associating black life with the great rivers of Africa and North America—the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile, and the Mississippi—rivers that are ancient, dusty, and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. In a similar poem, “Negro,” Langston Hughes wrote:

I am a Negro:                     Black as the night is black,                     Black like the depths of my Africa. 

(Poems 8)

Again, in a poem entitled, “My People,” he wrote: “The night is beautiful So the faces...