Point of View

The poem is told from the first-person perspective of the unnamed speaker “I” who describes his experiences with racism and determination to overcome them. The "I" signifies Hughes's endeavor to find and create a voice for Black culture and history. On the one hand, the “I” is clearly an individual describing his personal experiences. On the other hand, the “I” can also function as a stand-in for African Americans generally. Moreover, given the reference to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” in which the “I” represents all of America, the speaker of Hughes’s poem could be broader than a single individual.

The choice to begin the poem with “I,” as a direct response to Whitman, calls attention to the role of the artist. “I, too, sing America” is not only a critique of segregation, but of the exclusion of African Americans from what is...