Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your
veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
> From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!
from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used with permission.
http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2003/may/mccarthy/hughes.html
Testimony of Langston Hughes (accompanied by his counsel, Frank D. Reeves)
before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee
on Government Operations, Tuesday, March 24, 1953:
> ...Senator Dirksen. We will put all of it in the record, of course, but I
> will read you the third stanza.
Goodbye, Christ Jesus, Lord of Jehovah, Beat it on away from here now Make way for a new guy with no religion at all, A real guy named Marx communism, Lenin Peasant, Stalin worker, me.
How do you think the average reader would take that? Mr. Hughes. Sir; the average reader is very likely to take poetry, if they take it at all, and they usually don't take it at all, they are very likely often not to understand it, sir. I have found it very difficult myself to understand a great many poems that one had to study in school. If you will permit me, I will explain that poem to you from my viewpoint. Senator Dirksen. Of course, when all is said and done a poem like this must necessarily speak for itself, because notwithstanding what may have been in your mind, what inhibitions, whether you crossed your fingers on some of those words when you wrote them, its impact on the thinking of the people is finally what counts. May I ask, do you write poetry merely for the amusement and the spiritual and emotional ecstacy that it develops, or do you write it for a purpose? Mr. Hughes. You write it out of your soul and you write it for your own individual feeling of expression. First, sir, it does not come from yourself in the first place. It comes from something beyond oneself, in my opinion. Senator Dirksen. You think this is a providential force? Mr. Hughes. There is something more than myself in the creation of everything that I do. I believe that is in every creation, sir. Senator Dirksen. So you have no objective in writing poetry. It is not a message that you seek to convey to somebody? You just sit down and the rather ethereal thoughts suddenly come upon you? Mr. Hughes. I have often written poetry in that way, and there are on occasions times when I have a message that I wish to express directly and that I want to get to people. Senator Dirksen. Do you know whether this poem was reprinted in quantities and used as propaganda leaflets by the Communist party? Mr. Hughes. No, sir, it was not. It was reprinted in quantities as far as I know, and used as a propaganda leaflet by the organizations of Gerald L. K. Smith and the organization of extreme anti-Negro forces in our country, and I have attempted to recall that poem. I have denied permission for its publication over the years. I have explained the poem for twenty-two years, I believe, or twenty years, in my writings in the press, and my talks as being a satirical poem, which I think a great pity that anyone should think of the Christian religion in those terms, and great pity that sometimes we have permitted the church to be disgraced by people who have used it as a racketeering force. That poem is merely the story of racketeering in religion and misuse of religion as might have been seen through the eyes at that time of a young Soviet citizen who felt very cocky and said to the whole world, "See what people do for religion. We don't do that." I write a character piece sometimes as in a play. I sometimes have in a play a villain. I do not believe in that villain myself...