Tag Archives: Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes on Evictions

By Robin Bates | Published: July 26, 2020

When potentially 23 million American renters facing eviction, Langston Hughes’s “Ballad of a Landlord” feels timely.

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We All Sing America

By Robin Bates | Published: July 3, 2020

Between them, Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes do a good job of defining America.

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I Am a Part of You and You of Me

By Robin Bates | Published: June 29, 2020

Langston Hughes provides an important and humane voice at this point in time.

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A Dream of Black and White Together

By Robin Bates | Published: February 2, 2019

Spiritual Sunday My mother and I went to hear St. Olaf’s sublime choir at Sewanee’s All Saints Chapel Thursday night. (This in spite of the fact that we both attended St. Olaf’s archrival, Carleton College.) Amongst the program’s “peace on earth” offerings was an arrangement of Langston Hughes’s “I Dream a World.” I share it […]

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Langston Hughes on the Dignity of Work

By Robin Bates | Published: September 3, 2018

Langston Hughes understood working men and women as well as anyone, as his poem “Brass Spittoons” demonstrates.

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Believing in the Great White Race

By Robin Bates | Published: March 16, 2018

Teaching Langston Hughes’s “Ku Klux” in Ljubljana prompted the students to think of Europes neo-fascists.

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Poems for Resisting Trump

By Robin Bates | Published: December 28, 2017

New York columnist Roger Cohen suggests two poems for resisting Trumpism: “if” and “Harlem.”

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Beware of Literature’s Purity Police

By Robin Bates | Published: November 3, 2017

Laura Moriarty’s “American Heart” has been attacked for being a white savior narrative. Such stories should in fact be critiqued, but the attackers are often a bigger problem.

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Do You Believe in the Great White Race?

By Robin Bates | Published: August 25, 2017

There’s a marked contrast between the nobility people claim for the Confederate statues and the young men swarming around them. Langston Hughes understood the contrast in his darkly humorous “Ku Klux.”

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