Langston Hughes: The Harlem Renaissance

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During the early 1900’s many African-Americans were moving from the south to the north. This event would late be called the Great Migration. Many of them would settle in a neighborhood in New York. This one of a kind neighborhood was named Harlem. Harlem became a center for a new generation of African-American Artists. The Artist would build the foundation for a new era. The name for this era was The Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance allowed for the African-Americans to manifest a new type of culture as demonstrated by the one and only Langston Hughes. During the height of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes created poetry that was musically in sound, and this allowed him to capture a blues essence into his poetry. This gave life …show more content…

/ and not South [9- 15]
The speaker states that he is trying to be anywhere but the southern states. In the poem, the speaker continues to express what aspects of the south that he is trying to out run:
I am fed up / With Jim Crow laws, / People who are cruel / And afraid, / Who lynch and run, / Who are scared of me / And me of them. / I pick up my life / And take it away [16-24]
There is a feeling of taking control of one’s life the moment the speaker decided to go to the north and move away from the south. There’s a slight understanding of how the Harlem Renaissance came into existence as African Americans began to express themselves in hopes of having control of their …show more content…

However, this work also conveys the message of double consciousness. What is double consciousness? Double consciousness describes the individual sensation of feeling as though your identity is divided into several parts, making it difficult or impossible to have one unified identity (Understanding W.E.B. Du Bios’). In the poem, Hughes kept referring to the singer as an African American. By doing this it is obvious that the musician was not going to be just a musician, but an African American musician. Langston Hughes expresses this when he writes, “With his ebony hands on each Ivory key” (9). The Ivory keys represent the part of American society he wants to be a part of, but his skin color rules him out of it. The singer is then torn by his feeling and wither or not he is an African American musician, or just a musician. Especially when he says “I ain’t got nobody in all this world / I ain’t got nobody but ma self” (19-20). Hughes manages to depict the isolation that African Americans are wedged between when dealing with double consciousness. “The Core issue of double or multiple consciousness is the mediation of the self-perspective, the acquisition of self-knowledge through mechanisms controlled by a hostile other” (Davis 277). He is not wanted in white society because of his skin color, and he is not included in African American

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