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When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

Langston Hughes

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Langston Hughes
Age: 66 †
Born: 1901
Born: February 1
Died: 1967
Died: May 22
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Writer
Joplin
Missouri
James Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes
Poverty
Mention
Color
Poems
Somebody
Tells
Lines
Unions
Stop
Police
Talking
Trade
Moon
Colonies
Begin
Colony

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Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe.
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I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.
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Everything there is but lovin' leaves a rust on your old soul
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What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
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The calm, Cool face of the river, Asked me for a kiss
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Negroes - Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind: Beware the day - They change their mind.
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If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who's coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.
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This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.
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I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
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Summer was made to give you a taste of what hell is like. Winter was made for landladies to charge high rents and keep cold radiators and make a fortune off of poor tenants.
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Reach Up Your Hand... and take a star.
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Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
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Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.
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Rest at pale evening... A tall slim tree... Night coming tenderly Black like me
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Though you may hear me holler, And you may see me cry-- I'll be dogged, sweet baby, If you gonna see me die.
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We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren?t it doesn?t matter.
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When I were a young man, I used to play baseball and steal bases just like Jackie Robinson. If the empire would rule me out, I would get mad and hit the empire.
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Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.
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I look at my own body With eyes no longer blind- And I see that my own hands can make The world that's in my mind.
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Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.
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