Langston Hughes Harlem

One of Langston Hughes’s most famous works, A Dream Deferred, is a poem taught in many schools. Hughes wrote "Harlem" in 1951, and it addresses the theme of limitations of the American Dream for African Americans. The poem has eleven short lines in four stanzas that contains questions, mostly derived from: "What happens to a dream deferred?"
In the mid 20th century, America was still racially segregated. African Americans were still challenged by society after their emancipation during the Civil War, which made them into second-class citizens. Mostly prominent in the South, blacks were often lynched. Hughes wrote "Harlem" only three years before the seminal Supreme Court decision in the 1954 case Brown vs. Board of Education that declared state laws establishing segregation in schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The tone of his work reflects Hughes' experience of segregation and he comes across as sympathetic, enraged, yet hopeful.
Hughes titled this poem “Harlem” after the New York neighborhood that became the center of the Harlem Renaissance. A major creative explosion in music, literature, and art, many African Americans saw this
It could be an poet, a professor, or any black man or women. The speakers keeps pondering about the dream deferred and the question provokes thoughts that makes readers realize an important aspect of the struggles of African Americans. Hughes utilized analogies to evoke the image of a dream deferred. He imagines it drying up, festering, stinking, crusting over, or, exploding. These imagines have negative connotations to them as the diction he used are often negative. Each image allows the readers to smell, feel, and taste the postponed dreams. The use of imagery makes the reader compare this concept to things that they negatively associate with. In accordance to the speaker, the dream undergoes gradual transformation that would eventually lead to the ultimate