Mother To Son, By Langston Hughes

The history of African Americans is one the most in depth historical groups to have ever walked the earth. While some believe the history first started with slavery, most will know that African Americans derive from ancestors in Africa where the beginning of everything started. During the 1920s in New York City, an explosion of the arts took place in Harlem and this was known as the Harlem Renaissance. Poets such as Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, musicians such as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Intellects like W.E.B. Dubois, and many others deflect stereotypes that most of America had on black people. However, African Americans were still struggling for racial equality and even today the struggle continues. Using poems written by
The poem may seem superficial yet, there is more to it. In "Mother to Son", the mother tells her son what life has been to her: Well, son, I’ll tell you: Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It’s had tacks in it, And splinters,..And places with no carpet on the floor—Bare. (Hughes 7) In the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the protagonist a slave named Tom arrives at a new plantation in Louisiana and the description of the place alludes with the Mother speaking to her son. In chapter 32, page 4, paragraph 8 Tom has the same conditions as the Mother; "...they were mere rude shells... furniture, except a heap of straw, foul with dirt...on the bare ground"(Stowe 4). Even though Uncle Tom's cabin was a piece of fiction that took place during slavery, the poem Mother to Son has similarities of conditions post Reconstruction. African Americans might have been emancipated, yet during Reconstruction southern states passed statutes that unjustly targeted freed Blacks and the Supreme Court doctrine "Separate but equal" passed de facto laws for segregation. Although racial injustices are prominent throughout African American history, religion has played a role of sanctuary from slavery unto now. Slaves talked of reaching the promise land and comparison of the Israelites who were trying to escape from Pharaoh in Exodus during Biblical days and the mother talked of the same. "But all the time I'se been a-climbin' on, And reachin' landin's, .."(Hughes 1). That ladder the Mother speaks of Jacob's ladder, a Biblical reference to Genesis 28:10-12 on climbing a ladder to Heaven. Slaves sung a spiritual called We are climbing up Jacob's Ladder for reaching the sanctity of Heaven and escape their woes on Earth. Even though the poem came out in 1922 where Blacks' experienced economic and social growth during the Roaring Twenties and Harlem Renaissance, there were still racial