Harlem. He was even called the "Poet-Laureate of Harlem" because of his understanding for the city. Hughes best volume of Harlem works is Montage of a Dream Deferred. Hughes was the author who during the Harlem Renaissance used much of the Black culture in his work. He began to use the Blues, Ballad form, dance rhythms, folk speech, and Jazz in his poetry. Hughes had success in many different fields of writing. His best drama, "Mulatto," a play, was performed on Broadway 373 times in 1935. In his best comedy, "Little Ham"(1935), again he uses themes from Harlem. Hughes's best fiction is in his "Simple" series. In his lifetime, Langston Hughes won several awards. In 1925 he won his first prize for poetry in the Opportunity contest and third prize for essay in the Crisis contest. In 1926 he published his first volume of poems, The Weary Blues. In 1953 he won the Anisfeld-Wolfe Award. Hughes also won the Witter Bynner Prize for undergraduate poetry while attending Lincoln University. Even West Indian poets, such as Leopold Senghor, saw Hughes as the father of the Negritude Movement(Davis). One of Hughes's works mentioned in the book, The Langston Hughes Reader, is entitled, My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience. This short story of his is a true story of his childhood. It shows all the themes he is fighting for and the things he is fighting against. What happens is that

nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. I did not, as a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see or hear." (Norton, 1944) With the duality of perspective came also one of language, a fact to which we owe his writings and abolitionist activism. This is seen in Douglass' reflection

Douglass. The story of the American Dream has been embedded deeply in our (American) culture from the beginning. Similarly anchored in the American consciousness is the presence of a 'slavery-complex'. Along these lines Douglass' role is a major one, for relatively few first-hand accounts of slavery as powerful and representative as his exist, in light of the magnitude of the crime, and few voices have been as far-reaching. More recent heirs of this 'office' such as Malcolm X have carried the torch further, just as America's racial sickness still clings to our collective consciousness. Frederick Douglass has been described as 'bicultural'. In other

This succession of names is illustrative of the transformation undergone by one returning from the world of the dead, which in a sense is what the move from oppression to liberty is. Frederick Douglass not only underwent a transformation but, being intelligent and endowed with the

pathetic tone...they would sing, as a chorus...words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which,

leaves scars just as deep as those of slavery itself. It makes fundamental alterations in the very identi

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2131
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)