Langston Hughes lived during a turbulent time of adversity. He lived through both world wars, the Harlem Renaissance, and the beginning of the Civil rights movement. With his novels and books of poetry, he tried to enlighten the white to the problems and troubles of the minorities, and encourage the black to take a stand against their deferred dreams and work towards a better future.

The two poems I have chosen to illustrate this are "A Dream Deferred" and "Let America Be America Again." "A Dream Deferred" was written in 1948. It discusses when a dream is given up on willingly, like how many black people gave up their dreams while suffering under the oppression of the whites. Hughes represents this with the symbolism of a raisin drying up in the sun, the white people shrinking and shriveling the African-Americans and their hopes until they remained a dried out...