Dreams

Though “Dreams” doesn’t explicitly mention race, Hughes’s link to the Harlem Renaissance and his avowed commitment to expressing Black experiences connect his body of work, including this poem, to race. Through the historical lens of the Harlem Renaissance, the reader sees how the hopes and dreams of Black people face particular peril. Hughes published “Dreams” in 1923 when the Black Codes and Jim Crow legislation dominated the South. The purpose of such unjust laws was to maintain the racist power dynamic that reigned before the Civil War and the prohibition of slavery through the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. The prejudiced policies exposed Black people to violent harassment and lynchings.

Yet Black people countered the adversity and did not let bigoted norms deprive them of their hopes and dreams. Displaying mobility, millions of Black people left the South hoping to experience less racism in Northern cities; this movement, between 1914 and 1919 became known as the Great Migration. However, as professors Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theohairs note in “How New York City Became the Capital of the Jim Crow North,” Northern cities also contained racism that threatened the aspirations of Black people.

In 1921, two years before Hughes published “Dreams,” a group of white people in Oklahoma attacked the wealthy Black community in Greenwood—known as Black Wall Street—burning around 1,000 homes and businesses and killing up to 300 Black people. In 1931, eight years after Hughes published his poems, two white women falsely accused a group of Black teens of rape, and the young Black men became known as the Scottsboro Boys; Hughes traveled to meet with them. The burning of Black Wall Street and the trials of the Scottsboro Boys are only two examples of the adversity Black people faced. In Hughes’s first novel, the autobiographical Not Without Laughter, the main character’s grandmother tells him, “You’s colored honey, an’ you’s liable to have a hard time in this life” (Hughes, Langston. Not Without Laughter. Macmillan, 1969. p. 198).

For others, the 1920s was when dreams and hope flourished. Young people fulfilled themselves and socialized via jazz music and the blues, marking the steady integration of Black culture into mainstream American culture. Conversely, the influence of Black culture enlarged the domestic terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), giving them around 4 million members. Though Black people made advances, their hopes and dreams stayed vulnerable to lethally racist elements in American society. Black people were not—and are not—the only precarious group in America, yet Hughes’s Black identity specifically binds the poem “Dreams” to the Black experience and the difficulty for Black people to “[h]old fast to dreams” (Lines 1, 5).