Hughes’s last collection of poems commemorates the experience of Black Americans in a voice that no reader could fail to hear-the last testament of a great American writer who grappled fearlessly and artfully with the most compelling issues of his time.

Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th-century American literature … a powerful interpreter of the American experience. -The Philadelphia Inquirer

From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was America’s acknowledged poet of color. Here, Hughes’s voice-sometimes ironic, sometimes bitter, always powerful-is more pointed than ever before, as he explicitly addresses the racial politics of the sixties in such pieces as Prime,
Motto,
Dream Deferred,
Frederick Douglas: 1817-1895,
Still Here,
Birmingham Sunday.

History,
Slave,
Warning, and Daybreak in Alabama.