In sonnets and anthems, odes and epics, Black poets in the Americas confronted violence and indifference, legal barriers to reading and writing, illegal suppression of voting rights, and outright threats to their personhood, livelihood, and neighborhoods…For American Americans, the very act of composing poetry proves a form of protest.” They wrote about what they saw around them and also what they dreamed up-even if it was a dream deferred, derailed or flat-out denied. “For more than 250 years, African Americans have written and recited and published poetry about beauty and injustice, music and muses, Africa and America, freedoms and foodways, Harlem and history, funk and opera, boredom and longing, jazz and joy. Young recently edited the landmark anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, which definitively presents its full, dazzling scope and illuminates its centrality to American literature. For this and other reasons including their shared love of jazz, Young feels an affinity for Hughes, and writes about him in To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor and in Brown, a poetic reflection on his Midwest childhood.
African American History Month begins today on February 1 we also celebrate the birthday of Langston Hughes, one of the most powerful voices in American poetry.īoth Langston Hughes and Kevin Young, also an acclaimed poet as well as incoming director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, grew up in towns around the Midwest and spent formative years in Kansas.
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