Langston Hughes and Dream Deferral

Abstract

“Langston Hughes and Dream Deferral” examines the protests over George Floyd’s murder through the lens of Langston Hughes’s famous motif of dream deferral. Keith Gilyard argues that Hughes’s primary concern as a poet was illuminating the process by which black people’s dreams have been deferred throughout American history. However, much of the essay focuses on conflicting viewpoints on black resistance in the post-civil rights era. Gilyard shows how Hughes speaks to contemporary issues, interweaving between the poet’s commentaries on politics and the controversies over the use of violence during the protests.