Let America Be America Again
FOLLOWING DONALD TRUMP’S election, a poem by Langston Hughes started trending on social media and, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and others in police custody, the poem has found new urgency. Perhaps it was the word again that first drew people’s attention. Decades before Trump used the word in his 2016 campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again,” Hughes published a poem called “Let America Be America Again.”
Lamenting the conditions of the Depression, with millions unemployed, the poem asks what happened to America, the purported “homeland of the free.”
Sometimes referred
