Tag Archives: Langston Hughes

A Hughes Poem in a SCOTUS Hearing

By Robin Bates | Published: March 24, 2022

By citing Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again,” Sen. Booker honored the occasion of the first African American woman being nominated for the Supreme Court.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Let America Be America Again", "Mother to Son", Cory Booker, Letanji Brown Jackson, SCOTUS nomination | Comments closed

No Crystal Stair for Judge Jackson

By Robin Bates | Published: March 22, 2022

The prospect of a Black woman being nominated to the highest court in the land bring to mind Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son.” In other words, it’s been a long climb.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Mother to Son", Ketanji Brown Jackson, Supreme Court, Supreme Court hearings | Comments closed

Black Poetry–Next on the Right’s List?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 31, 2022

Many iconic African American poems could discomfit certain white audiences. Will the right target those as well as black history?

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "i am accused of tending to the past", "Ballad of Birmingham", "Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till", "Song for a Dark Girl", African American History Month, censorship, Dudley Randall, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, racism | Comments closed

Book Bans Again on the Rise

By Robin Bates | Published: January 18, 2022

With book bans on the rise, Langston Hughes’s “My Adventures as a Social Poet” is must reading. So is Brecht’s “Burning of the Books.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Burning of the Books", Bertolt Brecht, Book banning, Ethnic Studies, librotraficantes, My Adventures as a Social Poet | Comments closed

The Lynching of Jesus

By Robin Bates | Published: January 15, 2022

In “Christ in Alabama,” Hughes imagines a black Christ being lynched by a white mob.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Christ In Alabama", lynching, Martin Luther King, Scottsboro Boys, segregation | Comments closed

The City on the Hill Requires Climbing

By Robin Bates | Published: January 25, 2021

Amanda’s Gorman’s “Hill We Climb” provides an African American slant to Winthrop’s “city on a hill” image.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Mother to Son", "Hill We Climb", Amanda Gorman, Biden inauguration, city on a hill, I Have a Dream speech, Martin Luther King | Comments closed

Use Poetry to Teach American Civics

By Robin Bates | Published: January 12, 2021

Poetry can be used to teach core American values, which we need at the moment more than ever.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "I Too Sing America", "Nation's Strength", "New Colossus", Capitol invasion, Emma Lazarus, Patriotism, Ralph Waldo Emerson | Comments closed

Lit for Understanding the Biden Voter

By Robin Bates | Published: December 8, 2020

To understand “the Joe Biden” voter, start with August Wilson’s “Fences.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "I Too Sing America", 2020 election, August Wilson, black voters, Donald Trump, fences, Joe Biden | Comments closed

To Memorialize, Turn to Poetry

By Robin Bates | Published: August 3, 2020

John Lewis’s mentor James Lawson read a Czeslaw Milosz poem at Lewis’s funeral, showing how deeply he understood social activism.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "I Dream a World", "Invictus", "Meaning", Czeslaw Milosz, funerals, Hamlet, James Lawson, John Lewis, Romeo and Juliet, William Ernest Henley, William Shakespeare | Comments closed