“Harlem” is a short, reflective poem, somber in tone, with an ominous, pointedly italicized ending. It appeared originally as the first poem in the last sequence of poems (“Lenox Avenue Mural”) in the book Montage of a Dream Deferred. Sometimes Montage of a Dream Deferred has been reprinted in its entirety (as in Hughes’s Selected Poems); sometimes “Lenox Avenue Mural” has been reprinted separately; often “Harlem” has been reprinted alone.

The poem can stand alone. Although it is part of a suite of six poems (“Lenox Avenue Mural”) and of a book of ninety-one poems (reduced to eighty-seven in Selected Poems), it is self-contained and autonomous. It consists of seven short sentences, the last six of which respond to the opening question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” Of the six responses, all but one are themselves framed as rhetorical questions. The whole of Montage of a Dream Deferred is set in Harlem, yet only two of its ninety-one poems mention Harlem in their titles (“Harlem” and “Night Funeral in Harlem”). Simply being titled “Harlem” gives this particular lyric a special recognition in the sequence.

The “dream deferred” is the long-postponed and, therefore, frustrated dream of African Americans: a dream of freedom, equality, dignity, opportunity, and success. This particular poem does not define or give examples of the dream (many other poems in Montage of a Dream Deferred do this); it concentrates, instead, on possible reactions to the deferral of a dream, ranging from the fairly mild-mannered (“Does it dry up/ like a raisin in the sun?”) to the threatening (“Or does it explode?”). The first five potential responses to frustration are essentially passive, the last one active.

Langston Hughes first made his home in Manhattan’s Harlem in 1922. He was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920’s flowering of African American literature and art. Although he traveled widely and often, he kept circling back to Harlem. He lived there, on a more-or-less permanent basis, from the early 1940’s on, maintaining a home on West 127th Street for the last twenty years of his life. Montage of a Dream Deferred is a product of the late 1940’s, when Hughes had at last settled in Harlem.

The variety of responses that “Harlem” suggests as reactions to the deferring of a dream may be taken as a sort of cross-section of behavior patterns Hughes saw around him among the citizens of Harlem. The poem reflects the post-World War II mood of many African Americans. The Great Depression was over, the war was over, but for African Americans the dream, whatever particular form it took, was still being deferred. As Arthur P. Davis wrote in a 1952 article in Phylon, “with Langston Hughes Harlem is both place and symbol. When he depicts the hopes, the aspirations, the frustrations, and the deep-seated discontent of the New York ghetto, he is expressing the feelings of Negroes in black ghettos throughout America.”

The most striking features of “Harlem” are the vivid, even startling, metaphors that Hughes introduces as possible answers to the poem’s opening question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” Each metaphor could be taken as suggesting a pattern of behavior. Drying “up/ like a raisin in the sun” could refer to the gradual shriveling of a dream or a person, still sweet but wrinkled, desiccated. (Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, ruminates on this sort of response to a dream deferred—taking its title from Hughes’s poem.)

To “fester like a sore—/ And then run” suggests something considerably more unappealing—and dangerous—than drying up: a wound not healing. Eventually a limb or a life may be lost. Worse still among its implications is that it will “stink like rotten meat,” for now life is gone from the organism entirely and putrefaction has set in. “Stink” is used as an intentionally offensive, vulgar word, suitable for the occasion.

So far there has been a kind of logical progression, from dehydration to localized decay (“fester”) to wholesale decomposition, but here the poem takes a surprising turn. To “crust and sugar over—/ like a syrupy sweet” seems anticlimactic at first, after rot; “sugar” and “sweet” recall the concentrated sweetness of a raisin.

Hughes may have been thinking of a false, “syrupy sweet” form of behavior—what Paul Laurence Dunbar, in his poem, “We Wear the Mask,” called “the mask that grins and lies”—an outer “crust” that hides. The poem does not say what it hides, but one may be reminded of the narrator’s grandfather in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952), a grinning, subservient old man who, on his deathbed, “had spoken of his meekness as a dangerous activity”—who had told his grandson “to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you [like too much sugar, perhaps] till they vomit or bust wide open.”

Each of the last two answers to the question “What happens to a dream deferred?” is set off from the others. Penultimately, there is the statement, “Maybe it just sags/ like a heavy load”—perhaps the saddest of the responses, suggesting depression and despair. Finally, there is the overtly warning question: “Or does it explode?” When violence broke out in America’s inner cities in the 1960’s, Hughes’s poem proved to have been prophetic.

By no means are the metaphors in “Harlem” meant to exhaust the number of possible responses to the deferring of a dream. Indeed, another poem in Montage of a Dream Deferred, “Same in Blues,” uses a repeated refrain to state that in a dream deferred there is “A certain/ amount of traveling,” “A certain/ amount of nothing,” and “A certain/ amount of impotence.” The poem notes that “There’s liable/ to be confusion/ in a dream deferred.” Even with “traveling,” “nothing,” “impotence,” and “confusion,” the list of responses is nowhere near exhausted. There may be as many dreams deferred as there are residents of Harlem or as there are African Americans.

Harlem, the location referenced in the poem's title, is a well-known neighborhood in New York City. Since World War I, it has been home to one of the largest African-American communities in the United States. During the 1920s, Harlem became a hub for artists and intellectuals, an era later termed the Harlem Renaissance due to its explosion in artistic output, similar to the European Renaissance. Notable individuals of the Harlem Renaissance include Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Dr. Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes. Over time, Harlem has remained a significant center of African-American culture.

When "Harlem" was published in 1951, race relations in the United States were markedly different from today. While racism persists, there are now laws designed to combat discrimination. These laws were primarily enacted between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, a time when African Americans grew increasingly frustrated with postponed aspirations, and Whites, particularly in the Southern states, resisted the societal push towards equality. Although the Civil War ended in 1865, abolishing slavery in the United States, freed African Americans were not granted full citizenship. In the late 1800s, former slave states enacted Jim Crow laws, named after a demeaning character from an 1832 minstrel show. These laws prohibited African Americans from voting, using public transportation, attending schools with Whites, and participating in other societal activities that would have promoted equality. Despite opposition, especially in the North where slavery had not existed, the Supreme Court upheld these laws in 1886, provided that facilities for Blacks and Whites were "separate but equal." However, in practice, African Americans received substandard accommodations.

To prevent African Americans from gaining political influence, additional laws were implemented to obstruct voter registration, such as property ownership requirements and biased I.Q. tests, which were rarely given to Whites. Many African Americans migrated North, where discriminatory laws were less prevalent, although social discrimination persisted. Opportunities for advancement remained limited, largely due to a cycle of economic and educational disadvantage: under-educated individuals struggled to secure well-paying jobs, and low incomes hindered access to higher education. In the South, during the early 20th century, White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan frequently lynched African Americans.

During World War II, from 1941 to 1945, the U.S. armed forces became the most integrated organization the country had ever seen. Although it would still take decades for Blacks to reach higher officer ranks, opportunities were largely equal among enlisted men. This meant that returning veterans came home with a heightened awareness of the potential for racial equality, raising hopes for integration among both Whites and Blacks. However, these hopes sometimes turned into frustration when Black veterans found civilian life to be a regression from their experiences in the military. Full-scale riots erupted in 1946 in Columbia, Tennessee, and Athens, Alabama, along with numerous smaller racial confrontations in other cities.

As calls for racial openness in the United States grew, another social force was also on the rise: fear of Communism. World War II had weakened or destroyed many powerful European nations, leaving the Soviet Union as the only world power capable of rivaling the United States. The two countries had starkly different social philosophies and each feared that the other would infiltrate its government or media to cause its collapse. While both sides did attempt such tactics, it was not to the extent that citizens feared. In the South, some Whites used the public's fear of Communism to oppose integration. For example, in the 1948 Presidential election, Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey were challenged by southern Senator Strom Thurmond, who represented the newly formed States Rights Democratic Party. Thurmond claimed that mainstream Democrats supported civil rights due to their "Communist ideology," arguing that they intended to "excite race and class hatred" and "create chaos and confusion which leads to communism." Truman narrowly won the election.

In 1948, President Truman issued an Executive Order to establish a commission to study equal treatment in the armed forces. Historians believe that the commission's recommendations could have furthered integration if the country had not become involved in the Korean Conflict to combat the spread of Communism. As a result, proposals made by the Truman administration in 1949 concerning racial issues like lynchings and voter registration were delayed in Congress until the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Many of the legal inequalities that existed when Hughes wrote this poem were addressed in the 1950s and 1960s, often to prevent the violent conflict predicted in the poem. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka that it was impossible to maintain "separate but equal" schools, necessitating integration. This decision overturned the Plessy vs. Ferguson verdict from the 1890s, which had previously justified segregation. In 1955, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gained national prominence by leading a year-long boycott of Montgomery, Alabama's bus system, resulting in the end of the policy requiring Black passengers to sit at the back of the buses. In 1957, the President deployed U.S. troops to protect Black children who were admitted to a White school in Arkansas, as the state's governor attempted to block them with armed National Guardsmen. In 1961, Black and White "Freedom Riders" traveled across the South on buses to ensure that interstate highway rest areas were desegregated. The Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964 were passed by the legislature, transforming the nation's growing desire for integration into federal law.

Hughes employs an irregular meter in the lines of "Harlem," stressing different syllables in each line and varying their lengths. This combination of diverse line lengths and meter creates a sense of jagged, nervous energy that underscores the poem's themes of mounting frustration. In the introduction to Montage, Hughes mentions that he models his poetry's rhythms on musical forms like "jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and bebop." He explains that, similar to these musical styles, "[the volume] is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and imprudent interjections, broken rhythms and passages ... in the manner of a jam session."

Several lines feature rhymes, though there is no consistent rhyme scheme. Rhymes appear in lines 3 and 5 (sun, run), 6 and 8 (meat, sweet), and 10 and 11 (load, explode). Hughes might use these rhymes to highlight the poem's irregular rhythm or to draw attention to the connections between different ideas, such as "load" and "explode."

The first and last lines are separated from the rest of the poem. In line 1, this separation introduces and emphasizes the poem's central question, which is also the central question of the volume. The space between this line and the following stanza suggests that the answer is unpredictable and potentially threatening. The second stanza asks four questions in four sentences. By posing one question after another, Hughes builds tension within the poem. The final line is offset and italicized to highlight the potentially explosive social consequences of widespread dissatisfaction.

1951: The United States engaged in the Korean War to prevent communist North Korea from invading South Korea. The conflict concluded with a truce in 1953, establishing a De-Militarized Zone, but tensions between the nations persist.

1964-1973: U.S. forces fought in South Vietnam to stop Communist-backed North Vietnam from taking over. The U.S. withdrew in 1973, and South Vietnam fell in 1975.

1990: The Soviet Union, the world's largest Communist state, collapsed due to economic inefficiency.

Today: Communism is no longer seen as a significant threat to the U.S., with the most stable Communist nations being small Cuba and isolationist China.

1951: The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission constructed the first nuclear fusion reactor for power generation.

1979: An incident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, heightened public concern about nuclear energy safety.

1986: A radiation leak at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Soviet Union resulted in an unknown number of worker deaths (due to government secrecy) and rendered nearby areas uninhabitable for years.

Today: Although no new nuclear plants have been built since 1978, nuclear power still provides one-fifth of the United States' electrical energy.

An audio cassette called Langston Hughes Reads can be purchased from Audiobooks.

Sources

Farrell, Walter C., and Patricia A. Johnson, "Poetic Interpretations of Urban Black Folk Culture: Langston Hughes and the 'Bebop' Era," in MEWS, Fall 1981, pp. 57-72.

Jemie, Onwuchekwa, "Jazz, Jive, and Jam," in Langston Hughes, introduction by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1990.

Jemie, Onwuchekwa, Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1976, p. 234.

Rampersad, Arnold, The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume I, 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America, Oxford University Press, 1986.

For Further Study

Berry, Faith, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem, Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1983.

A meticulously researched biography by a founding member of the Langston Hughes Society, this book is filled with fascinating anecdotes.

Cashman, Sean Dennis, African-Americans and the Quest for Civil Rights 1900-1990, New York: New York University Press, 1991.

A very comprehensive and readable account of the growth of the Civil Rights movement.

Meier, August, and Elliot Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto, third edition, New York: Hill and Wang, 1976.

Although this book gives scant attention to the late 1940s and early 1950s, it includes a large, informative section about Hughes's role in the Harlem Renaissance.

Truman, Harry S., "Civil Rights Message," in The Negro in American History, Mortimer J. Adler, gen. ed., Charles Van Doran, ed., Encyclopedia Britannica Corp., 1969.

This is the text of Truman's address to Congress on February 2, 1948, outlining the actions the President believed should be taken in response to a report issued by the President's Committee on Civil Rights. A good indicator of the times, Truman's speech calls for the government to uphold rights that we now take for granted, such as "protecting more adequately the right to vote" and "providing federal protection against lynching."