"Allow AMERICA BE AMERICA Once again"

      Belching black smoke and blowing its whistle, the Empire State Express pulled out of M Central Station on an Oct evening in 1935, Cleveland jump.  On board for the all-nighttime ride were dozens of businessmen, a handful of salesmen, and one poet.

        The train rattled across an America in despair.  Three years into the New Deal, unemployment was 20 pct.  As the sun set, passengers peered out at hobo jungles, houses lit by gas lamps, cities broken and dilapidated.  Whatever mention of the American Dream seemed a mockery, only somewhere in the grim landscape, Langston Hughes began writing. . .

Let America be America again.

            Permit information technology exist the dream it used to be.

            Let it be the pioneer on the plain

            Seeking a abode where he himself is free.

            (America never was America to me.)

         Like the nation he described, Hughes wondered when he would bear upon bottom.  The success of his 20s as a leading light in the Harlem Renaissance had flickered.  Selling a verse form or a story every few months, he had since go a "literary sharecropper." Fate, he said, "never intended for me to have a full pocket of anything but manuscripts."   That jump, his father died in Mexico drawing him there with hope of an inheritance.  But he loathed his father, who had left the family, and the feeling was mutual.  He got goose egg.

            Allow America exist the dream the dreamers dreamed—

            Permit information technology exist that great strong country of honey

            Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

            That any human be crushed past ane higher up.

         Back from Mexico, he went to Los Angeles.  Holed upwardly in a dollar-a-dark motel, he wrote a children's book -- rejected, so failed to get a screenwriting job.  By tardily August he was headed home to his mother'southward in Ohio.  But he and his mother quarreled and he before long left for Manhattan on discussion that his play, "Mulatto," was headed for Broadway.  The play, gutted by the director,  got terrible opening dark reviews.  The side by side evening, Hughes boarded the railroad train for Cleveland, burdened at present by word that his mother had chest cancer.

O, let my state be a land where Liberty

            Is crowned with no faux patriotic wreath,

            But opportunity is real, and life is free,

            Equality is in the air we breathe.

            (There'southward never been equality for me,

            Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

From Manhattan to Buffalo and beyond, Hughes wrote for much of that evening.  Through the eyes of the downtrodden, he described America not as a nation only every bit an idea.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream

            In the Old Earth while yet a serf of kings,

            Who dreamt a dream so potent, and then brave, so truthful,

            That even yet its mighty daring sings

            In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned

            That'due south made America the state it has become.

         When he was done, Hughes rode on into the nighttime.  As the dominicus rose over Cleveland, he changed trains and headed dwelling house to help his mother.  He held no special fondness for his latest verse form.  The following summertime, when Esquire accustomed information technology, he was outraged that the magazine bought but fifty lines.  Still, he needed the money.  Hughes never discussed the poem over again.

        Only the dream described on a railroad train riding through the Depression has crept into our consciousness.  The poem rose from obscurity in 1992 when Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall read it to the American Bar Association.  It soon entitled a bear witness at the Museo del Barrio in Manhattan.  In 2004 "Let America Be America Again" became candidate John Kerry'southward theme.  That earned it the title of a new drove of Hughes' poetry.  In 2009, "Permit America..." became part of a hip-hop review.  It is now recited in poetry slams and taught in colleges and high schools.  Youtube videos recite it confronting a backdrop of patriotic imagery.  And the verse form rolls onward, cherished by all who see America as an idea and a work in progress...

And however I swear this oath-- America will be!

            Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

            The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

            We, the people, must redeem

            The country, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

            The mountains and the endless plain--

            All, all the stretch of these great dark-green states--

            And brand America again!