Statistics show that the account of African-American poverty Langston Hughes gives in his one-act play "Soul Gone Home" is still very true today.

In the play, as Ronnie, who has just died of tuberculosis contracted as a result of malnutrition, complains to his mother about her inability to be a good parent, we learn that Ronnie grew up in a single tenement room, undernourished, and left on his own to roam the streets. His mother was forced into prostitution because Ronnie's father "ruint" her, meaning impregnated her outside of marriage, leaving her to raise her "little bastard" son on her own through whatever means she could find, which was prostitution.

Though it has been nearly 80 years since Hughes wrote the play in 1937, we find that even today 27% of African Americans live in poverty, concentrated in ghettos, in comparison to "just 11% of all Americans" ("Poverty in Black America," Black Demographics). Among the impoverished African Americans, 46% are families with children, and 55% of those families are headed by single African-American women ("Poverty in Black America"). The percentage of single African-American women raising children is significantly lower than the 9.4% of single non-Hispanic white women raising children ("Household Composition," Women's Health USA 2012). These statistics show us that, just like in Ronnie's situation, nearly half of African-American children are still growing up in poverty, abandoned by fathers. In addition, 37% of African-American youths are incarcerated even though they only make up 16% of the total US youth population, which shows us that, like Ronnie, a large percentage of African-American youths today are still either growing up on the streets with all of its incriminating influences or being unjustly incarcerated (Kerby, "The Top 10 Most Startling Facts About People of Color"). Hence, as we can see, Hughes's "Soul Gone Home" is still an applicable portrayal of African-American poverty.