Langston Hughes Equality

Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King grew up in somewhat similar environments. Both, as african american men, had to deal with the everyday and very evident racism of an unequal society. Langston Hughes was raised by his Grandmother until her death. He went to live with his mother, “and they moved to several cities before eventually settling in Cleveland, Ohio,” (Biography.com Editors 2). Here, he went through the self-discovery period of teenage years, at Central High School, a predominantly white high school. He began to write poetry and graduated in 1920(Biography.com Editors 3).

Langston Hughes took a gap year to live with his father in Mexico and wrote “The Negro Speaks Rivers”, gaining him notability and a spot in The Crisis (Biography.com

Hughes makes metaphorical strides to an issue that still exists and is debated today; Despite radical progression racial equality still exists in modern society. Lloyd Brown, a white journalist states, “The assertion that ‘liberty and justice… for all’ is a concept ‘written down for white folks,” (2). Lloyd spent extensive time reviewing African Americans literature, from the civil war through the civil rights movement. This idea of an exclusionary unequal society is a featured theme in Dream Variation through the use the day to night metaphor. Line seventeen, “Night Come Tenderly/ is Hughes beckoning for civil rights. Dream Variation embodies the poet's views on equality and the American Dream.

It is the theme of American Dreams that caught Martin Luther King's attention. It is more than likely that King even titled the ‘I have a Dream’ speech after Dream Variation. The extensive metaphors in Dream Variation found its way into the speech. According to Miller, “King’s intimate knowledge of Hughes’s poem “I Dream a World” represents King’s earliest engagement with the metaphor of dreaming,” (Miller 2). The view of the American dream is expressed in the ‘I have a Dream’ speech. Martin Luther King took inspiration from Jefferson, Washington, and