Langston Hughes’s “Montage of A Dream Deferred” explores the American dream being sought after, yet impossible to grasp for blacks. Out of all of the poems in the Montage, the poem “Theme for English B”illustrates how the American dream of being accepted and successful is a hard thing for Hughes to do. In the poem, Hughes responds to his teacher’s English assignment which was a description of himself and his life. He declares that his race doesn’t make him any different, but he feels as if whites don’t want to accept or tolerate Hughes: “I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like/ the same things other folks like who are other races/… Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me” (25-34). Here, Hughes notes that his race is not a factor to separating what his race or others like or have in common. Even though he has this revelation, he descends into a rejected state as he contemplates whether whites do or do not want to be alongside blacks. This moment really made the thought of the hardships blacks faced such as being oppressed or feeling as if they did not belong with the majority of society.
Hughes’s “Montage of A Dream Deferred” and the selected poem “Theme for English B” was published in 1951. During the same year on November 27th, James Baldwin wrote an article in a magazine called The Reporter. The article “The Negro at Home and Abroad” focuses on the black experience within the United States and the world. Baldwin elaborates on how ignorance and the previous conditions of blacks has caused a distorted image of them. Baldwin writes, “image of the black man rests finally, one must say, on ignorance” (37). By saying this, Baldwin is stressing that fiction overrides the facts of black image and perception. Going back to Hughes’s “Theme for English B”, it is evident that his perception and concern for what other people think of him has stemmed from ignorance that has passed on from generation to his time.
Hughes, Langston. “Theme for English B.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. By Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 703. Print.
Baldwin, James. “The Negro at Home and Abroad.” The Reporter 27 Nov. 1951: 36-37.UNZ. Web. 27 Mar. 2014.
Excellent post!