Claude McKay and Langston Hughes

• Blog – Compare Hughes’ poetry to Claude McKay. What is similar? What is different?

Both Langston Hughes and Claude McKay write their poems for the same reasons. They write them because they want people to see African Americans as ‘normal’ people. One example is in “To My White Friends”, which says that African Americans are just as able of cruelty towards the whites as the whites are to the blacks. However, McKay makes his reason more clear in his story, “Home To Harlem.” This is the story of Jerco and Rosalind and the reasons African Americans are in certain situations. Most people, according to McKay think that African Americans are in situations because of what they are attracted to but then goes on to tell what the real reasons are, those include: love and kindness. While Langston Hughes talks about the same reasons he does so using different situations. McKay tended to use very unpleasant situations while Hughes incorporates education into his examples. In McKay’s “Home To Harlem” Jerco shows how he loves Rosalind because when she is sick he wants to help her. Most people would think that they are friends, but would not even think that Jerco loves Rosalind. McKay’s point in writing this story was not only to make African Americans seem like people, but also to fight against the idea that all blacks go into activities on purpose, without caring about others. So this story shows that African Americans are real people, with real feelings, that bad things are happening to. W.E.B. DuBois hated this story because it did not show great intellectual characters, so he saw it as a waste of McKay’s talent. In Hughes’s poems he shows how things that are important to blacks can also be things that are important to whites. This is especially shown in his poem, Theme for English B. In this poem the only black kid in the class tells us “I like a pipe for a Christmas present, or records-Bessie, bop, or Bach. I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like the same things other folks like who are other races.” (Pg. 1310) This is a clear example of why people should see African Americans as ‘normal’ people. Unlike his view on McKay’s “Home To Harlem”, W.E.B. DuBois probably would like the work of Hughes because of its focus on education. I say that DuBois would have probably liked the work of Hughes because after we read “The Souls of Black Folk”, I understood what his on African Americans was. He wanted African Americans to go up North and learn to read and write rather than stay in the South to work in the fields. So this tells me that because Hughes included education in his examples, DuBois would have enjoyed his work.