You will prepare and submit a term paper on Race Relations in the Poetry of Langston Hughes. Your paper should be a minimum of 1250 words in length.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on Race Relations in the Poetry of Langston Hughes. Your paper should be a minimum of 1250 words in length. It is not entirely race, he supposes, that keep people apart. In the poetry of Langston Hughes, rampant greed and cold-hearted capitalism stand out as the major obstacles to tolerance and brotherly love.

An early poem, "I, Too," expresses the inequality that Hughes witnessed in his own homeland, but tempers it with an inherent optimism. He expresses segregation with the phrase, "They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes," but the voice in this poem accepts this low starting point as a place from which the speaker can rise. This acceptance is seen in the following lines, "I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong." He seems to be saying that he will make the most of an unfair situation, that although it is clearly wrong for him to be sent to the kitchen if he keeps his spirits up and gathers his strength, he will gain recognition as worthy to sit at the table. Then, he surmises, he will be so strong that "Nobody'll dare Say to me, 'Eat in the kitchen." But he does not want to depend on intimidation. He hopes instead that white Americans will spontaneously embrace blacks once they open their eyes, lose their prejudices, and "see how beautiful I am." Essentially, the opening and closing lines, along with the title, express Hughes's hope that equality for black people in America will follow an easy, natural, and logical course because "I, too, am America." Here, he says that we are all Americans, and therefore the color of a person's skin should not affect their place in society.

Later work, written during the Depression, takes a darker tone and begins to express sympathy for armed violence and revolutionary ideas. In "The Same," Hughes laments the treatment of black people everywhere: "On the docks at Sierra Leone, In the cotton fields of Alabama, In the diamond mines of Kimberly, On the coffee hills of Haiti." Gone is the hope for simple, peaceful love seen in "I, Too." Now he cannot be content to eat in the kitchen, because to be black anywhere is to be "Exploited, beaten, and robbed.