Following Donald Trump’s election, a poem by Langston Hughes started trending on social media and, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and others in police custody, the poem has found new urgency. Perhaps it was the word again that first drew people’s attention. Decades before Trump used the word in his 2016 campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again,” Hughes published a poem called “Let America Be America Again.”
Sometimes referred to as the “poet laureate of Harlem,” Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest. After living in Mexico for a year, he arrived in New York in 1921 to study engineering at Columbia University. Drawn to the literary life, he joined other voices at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, writers such as Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Arna Bontemps. Hughes’s first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” published in 1921, addressed the Black experience in America: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”
Hughes left Columbia and traveled to the west coast of Africa, Rotterdam, Paris, and northern Italy, returning to the United States in 1924. In 1926, he published his first book of poems, The Weary Blues. Influenced by poets such as Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hughes embraced free verse. His collection included the poem “I, Too,” which opens “I, too, sing America,” and closes “I, too, am America.” (“I hear America singing,” his spiritual mentor Whitman had written.)
In 1929, Hughes graduated from Lincoln University, the nation’s first degree-granting historically Black college. He continued to travel widely and, through the 1930s, wrote poems, plays, short stories, and a novel. He was sympathetic to radical causes, and his work across the decade displayed a socialist rhetoric common to the era. But he never joined the Communist Party, as many of his friends may have.
Hughes published “Let America Be America Again” in an abbreviated version in 1936 and in its final form two years later in A New Song, a collection issued by the International Workers Order. The work addresses the meaning of America and offers both a critique and an affirmation of the American ideal.
Lamenting the conditions of the Depression, with millions unemployed, the poem asks what happened to America, the purported “homeland of the free.”
It begins “Let America be America again / Let it be the dream it used to be,” then continues, “Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed.” It’s a dream of freedom, equality, opportunity, and liberty—the ideals that form the bedrock of the nation. Yet a parenthetic voice adds, “(America never was America to me).”