Racial Inequalities of the 20th Century

The life of three people who were in the same place at the same time is a story of those who wanted to make a change in the world. A story of people who thought differently than others and sought to voice their thoughts to the entire world; so that a much needed change could take place. Langston Hughes according to Biography.com was, “Born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. He published his first poem in 1921. He attended Columbia University. He went on to write countless works of poetry, prose and plays. He died on May 22, 1967” (Langston Hughes Biography 1). He was a very educated man and this allowed his literature to not only appeal to African Americans but also be recognized by other highly educated white people. Zora Neale Hurston according to Biography.com was, “Born in Alabama in 1891, Zora Neale Hurston became a fixture of New York City’s Harlem Renaissance.Hurston died in poverty in 1960, before a revival of interest led to posthumous recognition of her accomplishments” (Zora Neale Hurston Biography 1). James Baldwin according to Biography.com was, “Writer and playwright James Baldwin was born August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York. One of the 20th century’s greatest writers, Baldwin broke new literary ground with the exploration of racial and social issues in his many works. He was especially known for his essays on the black experience in America”(James Baldwin Biography 1). As they were connected by  the guiding light of the Harlem Renaissance that guided the ways for many people to share their ideas a find a way to combat the injustices that filled the world at the time. Injustices such as discrimination and unfair treatment that affected every African American at this time. According to History. com the Harlem Renaissance was, “The development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art” (Harlem Renaissance 1). One of the foundations of this movement is the great migration of African Americans into urban areas. According to History.com the Great Migration, “The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem was meant to be an upper-class white neighborhood, but rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and desperate landlords seeking to fill them. In the early 1900s, a few middle-class black families moved to Harlem, and other black families followed.”(Harlem Renaissance, 1-2). As many of these African Americans moved in to these places they received treatment that is not equitable and discriminatory. This led to many of the inhabitants to start to voice their opinions through means that were provided to them or that interested them; for example literature.

African American literature addresses racial inequalities, it is of one of the best ways of portraying the struggles that many African Americans faced. In the 20th century three particular writers wrote about racial disparities. The writer James Baldwin was an activist for African American rights. Through his writing, one can see and understand why he fought for what he did. Zora Neale Hurston wrote about racial struggles that many people were facing at the time. Langston Hughes wrote to end the inequalities that many African Americans including himself were facing. They did this through the themes of place, relationship, and change in America. These writers helped to push America into the Civil Rights Movement that took place in the 1950s to 1970s.

 Langston Hughes used his poetry to fight for a change in America. In his poem “I, too, Sing America” he is protesting how African are treated at this time in the United States. In this poem he really tried to convey his belief that even though he was a Black he was still American and deserved the same rights and privileges as anyone else. Before one reads this poem they must know that according to Biography.com, when he first began to write poetry his teacher introduced him to the poetry of Walt Whitman who he would later say was one of his primary influencers ( Langston Hughes Biography 4). In the poem it says, “I, too, sing America”(Hughes, 1), this is a reference to the poem by Walt Whitman I Hear America Singing which talks about the culture of America but does not include African Americans. In the first line of Hughes poem he states that African Americans are also a part of America’s culture. In the second stanza it he says, “I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen, When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong” (Hughes 2-7). In this stanza he identifies himself as African American and when he says that he is sent to the kitchen when company comes he is talking about segregation and inequality. In the fourth stanza he says, “Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table. When company comes. Nobody’ll dare – Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then.” (Hughes 8-14). In this stanza he states that in future a day will come when African Americans are treated as equals. In this day and age nobody will be able to tell him to leave they will be to ashamed. In the final stanza he says, “I, too, am America” (Hughes 18). This points out his main goal which is that African Americans are part of America’s culture. This is the change in America that Hughes foresaw and deeply wanted to be true.

 Langston Hughes shows the theme of relationship in his essay The The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain. This poem shows relationship because it is his thoughts about the things that his young poet which he knew was saying. In this essay he started off by saying,

One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, “I want to be a poet not a Negro poet,” meaning, I believe, “I want to write like a white poet”; meaning subconsciously, “I would like to be a white poet” (Hughes 1-5). He started his essay off with from a young poet which he doesn’t name but it is believed to be Hughes contemporary Countee Cullen. In the poem Cullen is aspiring to be a white; someone he sees as having merit. Hughes is astonished by this and Cullens  denial of his skin, color, and heritage.In Hughes’s first paragraph he shows that there are times that African American artists strive for standardization and whiteness, this is the racial mountain shown in the title of the piece, and many African-American artists fight to climb it. The essay also says,

His family is of what I suppose one would call the Negro middle class: people who are by no means rich yet never uncomfortable nor hungry—smug, contented, respectable folk, members of the Baptist church. The father goes to work every morning. He is a chief steward at a large white club. The mother sometimes does fancy sewing or supervises parties for the rich families of the town. The children go to a mixed school. In the home they read white papers and magazines. And the mother often says “Don’t be like niggers” when the children are bad. A frequent phrase from the father is, “Look how well a white man does things.” (Hughes, 10-17)

In these lines Hughes speaks of an artist like himself that is trying to become like a white poet because of the way that was raised. The young poets parents both had jobs working for rich white people and he came from a middle class family. Lastly, he went to a unsegregated school, one of the only ones in the area he was raised. These things all led to his rejection of his on heritage. Hughes has pity on him because he was never taught the beauty of his own heritage, only the value of whiteness.  He then says, “So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, “I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet,” as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world. I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces …” (Hughes 15-17). In these lines he shows that he thinks that many of the issues that face America are racial issues and if one writes otherwise it is against one’s own heritage.               Langston Hughes uses the theme of place in his poem Harlem. In this poem he talks about the city which many of his ideas grew out of. The poem starts off by saying, “What happens to a dream deferred”(Hughes 1)? The way Hughes says “dream deferred” instead of “deferred dream” gives us the realization that we are not in a rational world, we are actually in the world of poetry, truth telling, and soul-searching.When he  beginning this poem with a question, the reader is made to start thinking. “Does it dry up”(Hughes 2). Things that dry up become withered and small. “Or fester like a sore”(Hughes 4). Hughes is saying that a  dream deferred won’t go away or heal. “Does it stink like rotten meat”(Hughes 6)? When something stinks it means that it is still there and has not gone away. This is like the dream deferred, it is only being ignored not deleted.“Or crust and sugar over – like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags –like a heavy load. Or does it explode”(Hughes 7-11)? It now tells us that this dream deferred started as something sweet or sugar coated. An example of this is a Black person wanting an end to segregation. This dream may be sweet but it might not be what it seems. By being led to believe such a fallacy, an African American may believe his or her present situation is better than the situation he or she dreams of, which would make him or her see the dream as sugar coated. The final comparisons are a delayed dream to a something that is too heavy to even bear and something that explodes. This final comparison of a delayed dream to an explosion is very powerful.By comparing a delayed dream to an explosion, he implies that if a dream is halted from being fulfilled and caused to bubble up and grow until the dreamer builds up enough energy that he/she explodes in a burst of energy to fulfill the dream, just as we can see with the starting of the Civil Rights Movement.

    James Baldwin shows the theme of place in his short story Sonny’s Blues. This story shows how life was like in Harlem and what people had to go through. In the story racism is often mentioned throughout like a dark vail. Though it is not often referenced directly but its can still be felt continuously. One example is when Baldwin talks about decrepit housing projects that rise out of Harlem like rocks in the middle of the boiling sea. These housing projects began to combine federal segregation laws which made it a representation of the impact of racism on a community. In the story the narrator has anxiety for his students, like sonny who is young and has to deal with discrimination against him even though he hasn’t done anything wrong. Much of the sadness and suffering in this story is because of the effects of racism. The narrator says that this suffering is something that has been passed down from one generation to another in the African American community. The constant but vague influence of racism becomes very clear when the narrator’s mother explains how drunk white men murdered her brother-in-law. She tries to warn the narrator that something like this could happen to Sonny; this showed her concern that racism is still a very real threat to the family. In this story Baldwin shows that the place in which you live can affect the way that you are raised and the way that you are treated.

 James Baldwin shows the theme of relationship in the book Go Tell it on the Mountain. This story shows relationship because he is talking about his own relationships in this semiaotobiographal. The book shows the damaged relationship Baldwin has with his stepfather and the racism that he faced.The book deals with 14-year-old John Grimes, whose intellect seems to him the way to escape the strictures of his straitlaced unloving stepfather who is a preacher. In his work to finish the book he moved to Switzerland where he could be in isolation for 3 months, writing and revising the work that had been forming in his mind since his mind since his early teens. In order to complete the book, Baldwin went to Switzerland and lived a fairly isolated life for three months, writing and revising material that had been taking shape in his mind since his early teens. When Baldwin’s book was finished it was met with positive reviews across the country because of the content and his eloquent, lyrical writing. In this novel the theme of ea In this novel the theme of racism centers around the character of Gabriel. In the book he makes a very big deal about it though not getting as much flout as Richard. Baldwin is Punctilious in showing how often Gabriel is angry at white people and trains his children to be the same. When Roy gets stabbed in a fight with white people, Gabriel takes the opportunity to say to John that that’s what white people do to black people; not giving any blame to Roy for causing trouble. Richard is the one who suffers the most though. He has been unjustly accused of a robbery that he didn’t commit.Richard sadly goes into a state of despair over the unfairness of the world even when he tries to better himself. The book also says, “You think I want to stay around here the rest of my life with these dirty niggers?” “Where do you expect us to live, honey, “I thought I married a man who didn’t just want to stay on the bottom all his life!” “And what you want me to do, Florence? You want me to turn white”(Baldwin 95-96). This excerpt again brings up the issue that some believe that if you want to become better and be successful you must imitate someone that is white. In this excerpt Baldwin tries to change this by idea that many people had at the time by bringing awareness to the issue and demanding that as a people we do better.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s book Every Tongue Got to Confess she uses the theme of change in america. This shows the theme of change in america because she addresses problems that she has witnessed and does not understand why they continue. In the book she says, “Why weren’t novels and poems by Americans of African descent being taught at the university? Why were so few of us attending and almost none of us teaching there” (Hurston np)? In these sentences she is bringing awareness to a major problem at the time which was the fact that many African Americans were not getting higher education. Many African Americans that were highly educated also never got a chance for their work to be admired in a school environment because of the discrimination at the time. She also says, “Why had the training I’d received in the so-called “best” schools alienated me from my particular cultural roots and brainwashed me into believing in some objective, universal, standard brand of culture and art essentialist” (Hurston np). Here she brings up that in her desire for higher education she was met with a force that tried to tell her that if she wanted more knowledge she would have to give up on her cultural roots and except those that were being fed to here by people who thought of her as less. Lastly, she says,  “Doomed people like me to marginality on the campus and worse, consigned the vast majority of us who never reach college to a stigmatized, surplus underclass.” Here she brings up the problem that those who are lucky to make it out and go to higher education are treated insignificantly while those who get stuck and go through discrimination which ends up forcing them into the underclass. Overall Hurston wishes that America was a place where African Americans are treated equally and they receive the same opportunities as those that are white. She hope that African Americans can be praised for their work and not just discriminated for their skin color.

 In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God she shows the theme of relationship. In this story Janie says, “We’se uh mingled people and all of us got black kinfolks as well as yaller kinfolks”(Hurston 151) by saying this she is combating Mrs. Turner’s belief that mixed folk are superior than other black people. In this story Mrs. Turner believes that lighter skinned folk should treat darker people poorly.  Janie brings up the fact that they both have relatives that are lighter and darker than them which makes Mrs. Turner’s argument illogical. Janie does not agree with Mrs. Turner’s ideas and in fact is in a relationship with a darker man. In this novel hurston is pushing that we should all be seen as equals and not discriminate just because of the color of one’s skin. Later in the story Tea Cake while helping bury dead bodies after the hurricane he says, “They’s mighty particular how dese dead folks goes tuh judgement…. Look lak dey think God don’t know nothin’ ’bout de Jim Crow law”(Hurston 172). In this quote Tea Cake is explaining how black and white people are being buried separately and how white people are buried in pine coffins while black people get nothing.  After seeing what is happening he says that there are no Jim Crow Laws in heaven. By saying this he is saying that this separation is wrong and that in God’s eyes there isn’t’ any discrimination. This again is a foreshadowing of the change that Hurston wishes to see in the real world.

 In Zora Neale Hurston’s story Mules and Men she uses the theme of place. These book was created during her travels to Florida, including Eatonville the town in which she was raised in and Polk County, and the other in New Orleans. The name Mules and Men is a symbol; mules because they were overworked and burdened like mules but were still human. The mule also stood for individualism, stubbornness, strength, and unpredictability which she believed were characteristics of African Americans. In one of the tales in this book she talks of a story of how black people were created. This story is part of the folklore that Hurston studied in Eatonville. It’s starts off by saying, God created people in a process that went piece by piece and how

 Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston all used their literature to convince and show awareness of the discrimination and racial inequalities in the 20th century with stalwart determination. Their ideas of equality, ending stereotypes, and ending discrimination permeated throughout America. More and more people began to join in this effort until it finally ended in an explosion of feelings, politics, and justice that we call the Civil Rights Movement that lasted during the 1950s and 1960s. This nonviolent protest              that fought for equal rights between white and African Americans was the pinnacle of what Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston were striving for.

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