to continuously stifle their dreams. In the poem, these unfulfilled aspirations are likened to a raisin drying in the sun, an open sore that get worse and has pus running out of it, and meat rotting and starting to stink. He also compares an unrealized dream to something that sags like a "heavy load." Finally, his speaker wonders if these bottled up dreams will "explode"?

It terms of the present day, it seems as if the denial of the American dream of dignity, well-paid work, decent housing, security, and economic independence to Black people, other minorities, and poor whites has gone on for so long that the country might explode. Although Black Americans made gains in the 1960s and 1970s, that started to end in the 1980s. Blacks lost a good deal of ground in the 2008 recession, and twelve years later have not recovered. Added to that has been police violence that has been especially targeted towards Black people. With the recent protests rising up in cities across the United States, it is hard not to see Hughes's poem as continually relevant. Hopefully, the country will see its way to some solution that offers hope.

One can argue that one potential dream to which the phrase "dream deferred" refers is that of racial equality and the end of discrimination against Black people in America in 1951. Hughes himself was Black, and—as is evident from his writings—he was keenly aware of the obstacles facing Black artists, all Black people in fact, as a result of white supremacy and systemic racism in the United States. Segregation was still legal in 1951, and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement was still a few years away. The Civil Rights Act, which repealed Jim Crow laws, would not be signed for another thirteen years. The dream of racial equality had been deferred for a long time: slaves may have been legally freed when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but Black people in 1951 continued to feel the confining effects and consequences of racism to a significant degree. Perhaps many people abandoned the dream, feeling it "dry up / like a raisin in the sun." Perhaps the dream deferred caused pain, like that caused by a "fester[ing] [...] sore" at the realization that the dream continued to be delayed. Maybe it seemed to "stink" or to "crust [...] over" or to weigh a person down, "like a heavy load." It could have all kinds of individual effects on a person, this knowledge that equality was still a long ways off. However, that deferred dream could also "explode," and Hughes's use of metaphor and italics in the final, single, line seem to indicate the truth of this idea. This, I think, is part of what we are seeing now in 2020. The Black Lives Matter movement has gained momentum in recent years as people have been galvanized by the deaths of many Black Americans at the hands of police or white civilians; overt racism has become more common, and attention is being drawn to the systemic racism that still pervades many institutions in America (e.g. the justice system). There is even violence—rioting, looting, destruction of property—and it is like an explosion of sorts, the kind Hughes refers to, as a result of pent up anger at injustice endured for so long. Now, it is not just affecting the Black population, but having ripple effects throughout all racial groups, just as a bomb would affect many more people than a festering sore or the smell of rotten meat.