rica and there was no racial dividedness, no black and white, just one people. And even though the poem is written in the first person, it is as if Hughes were speaking for all African Americans when he says,
             I bathed in Euphrates when dawns were young.
             I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
             I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
             I heard the singing of the Mississippi...
             As Adrian Oktenberg reflects in The Art and Language of Langston Hughes, every first-person reflection in the poem, 'I', 'me', is not referring to Hughes himself, or to " 'a' Negro but to 'the' Negro, suggesting the whole of the people and their history."
             Perhaps the one poem that embodies Hughes' optimistic outlook despite oppression is "I, Too." This poem also utilizes the free verse form that came to represent Hughes, his poetry, and the topics he addressed i
             ...