Letter From Birmingham Jail, By Langston Hughes

From 1954-1968, the majority of Americans worked together to achieve their goal of putting an end to legal laws of discrimination and racial segregation in the United States through the Civil Rights Movement. In the poem, “Harlem” by Langston Hughes, the letter “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr., and the article “A Letter To My Son” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, all demonstrate the struggles and unjust lives that African Americans went through back in the days till today. In Hughes’s poem, the readers are being demonstrated that the American Dream is inaccessible for African Americans because of the racial segregation and the usual poverty that most black people lived in. In King Jr.’s letter, he expresses the way laws were constructed to serve injustice to African Americans. In Coates’s letter to his son, he wrote about the racial injustices that African Americans lived through from now and back then. Although most Americans believe that all the promises of the Civil Rights Movement have been realized based on Obama’s speech on Selma, after analyzing a Langston Hughes poem, Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter, and the article “A Letter To My Son” it is clear that we still have a long way from truly ridding America of racial tensions and progressing toward becoming a more integrated America. If you were to look at the world through the eyes of an African American back in the 1950’s, you would notice that everything is in black and white rather than color.