Langston Hughes' 1935 Poem "Let America Be America Again" (information, words, & sound file)

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post showcases Langston Hughes' 1935 poem "Let America Be America Again".

The Addendum to this post presents a brief excerpt from an online article about the word "Negro" as a referent for African Americans.

The content of this post is presented for cultural, inspirational, and political purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to Langston Hughes for his cultural legacy. Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.

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INFORMATION ABOUT LANGSTON HUGHES' POEM "LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN"
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_America_be_America_Again
" "Let America Be America Again" is a poem written in 1935 by American poet Langston Hughes. It was originally published in the July 1936 issue of Esquire Magazine. It was later republished in the 1937 issue of Kansas Magazine and was revised and included in a small collection of Langston Hughes poems entitled A New Song, published by the International Workers Order in 1938.[1][2]

The poem speaks of the American dream that never existed for the lower-class American and the freedom and equality that every immigrant hoped for but never achieved. In his poem, Hughes represents not only African Americans, but other economically disadvantaged and minority groups as well. Besides criticizing the unfair life in America, the poem conveys a sense of hope that the American Dream is soon to come.[citation needed]

Hughes wrote the poem while riding a train from New York to his mother’s home in Ohio. He was in despair over recent reviews of his first Broadway play and his mother’s diagnosis of breast cancer. Despite being a pillar of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, he was still struggling for acceptance as a poet, battling persistent racism, and just eking out a living. Selling a poem or a story every few months, he called himself a "literary sharecropper." Fate, he said, "never intended for me to have a full pocket of anything but manuscripts."[3]

Hughes finished the poem in a night but did not regard it as one of his best. It did not appear in his early anthologies and was only revived in the 1990s, first in a public reading by Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, later as a title for museum shows."...

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SHOWCASE SOUND FILE - James Earl Jones reciting "Let America Be America Again"



Rusty Brewer, Published on Jul 4, 2018

Poem by Langston Hughes (1935)

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WORDS TO "LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN"
(Langston Hughes - 1902-1967)

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!


From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used with permission.

Online Source - https://poets.org/poem/let-america-be-america-again

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ADDENDUM
From https://www.npr.org/2017/12/13/568317026/negro-not-allowed-on-federal-forms-white-house-to-decide
'Negro' Not Allowed On Federal Forms? White House To Decide
December 13, 20173:01 PM ET
t has been called antiquated and even insulting.

But back in 1900, "Negro" was considered modern — a term that could replace a flawed set of categories used to classify people of African descent for the U.S. census.

This was a period when a person's race was determined by a census taker, who reported the information back to the federal government based on observations. "Be particularly careful to distinguish between blacks, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons," census takers were instructed for the 1890 census.

"The word 'black' should be used to describe those persons who have three-fourths or more black blood; 'mulatto,' those persons who have from three-eighths to five-eighths black blood; 'quadroon,' those persons who have one-fourth black blood; and 'octoroon,' those persons who have one-eighth or any trace of black blood."

But later in a report on the 1890 census results, the government concluded: "These figures are of little value." "Quadroon" and "octoroon" have never been used again for the census. ("Mulatto," first used in 1850, made return appearances in 1910 and 1920.)

The 1900 census took a different approach to counting people of African descent. For the first time, "Negro" was added to the instructions, and census takers were trained to write "B" on their worksheets to report a person as "black (Negro or of Negro descent)." Who fit that definition was up for the census taker's interpretation.

[...]

The Census Bureau said using "Negro" for the 1900 census was "justified" by what it saw as growing acceptance for the term, as it explained in a 1904 report called "Negroes in the United States":

[...]

After decades of an ongoing debate about labels, the term "Negro" — once commonly used by Martin Luther King Jr. and other early civil rights era leaders — gave way to the rise of "black" beginning in the mid-1960s and later "African-American" in the late 1980s."...

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