Harlem by Langston Hughes

Here is a spiky poem, built like a virus, that infected the minds of class-conscious integrationists and militants, alike. It dared to speak in the voice of a "native" and portray Negro life as it was. Hughes enumerates several of the options open to Black Folk in a country that did not make good on its promise of emancipation, but chose rather to ignore the law, or strangle the hope of freedom in a tangle of legalisms. The dream of equal representation, enfranchisement, equal opportunity, and civil rights had been "deferred" after 1877 (the end of the Reconstruction era) by the "separate but equal" provisions of the Jim Crow laws in the South. The question that Hughes asks is how are Black people supposed to live, educate themselves, earn a living, and raise their children in a white racist society? What social "types" are engendered by veiled oppression and freedom in name only? Are Black people expected to just wither and die, or become ill, or turn to crime? Or become buffoons? Or use their strength to merely bear the weight of oppression? Or should Black people follow the revolutionary principles outlined by the framers of the Constitution?