19 pages • 38 minutes read
Children’s Rhymes
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Background
Literary Context
Although "Children's Rhymes" was first published years after the Harlem Renaissance, the poem reflects the major tenants of the literary movement and shows how it helped Black writers maintain a forceful, distinct expression after the 1920s and 30s. While the poem's rhythm relates to the rhymes kids often recite, the diction is also an example of Black English or African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This is the name commonly attached to the dialect spoken by some Black people. Words like "ain't" and "a-tall" link to Black English and the drive for Black writers to express their condition and feelings in a voice that represents them and not what white people want Black people to be or sound like. As Hughes wrote in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” "If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.
At the same time, the poem is a part of a literary moment when many books became concerned with the injustices and situations facing Black people in the mid-20th century. In his essay, "Autobiographical Notes" (1955), James Baldwin complains that the shelves "groan" due to the amount of literature about Black people. The increased focus on racism might be why even the Black children know that white kids have rights they don't.
The quantity of books about Black people and racism also complicates the "lies" the speaker detects. For Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X, and other notable Black writers and leaders, the lies about liberty, justice, and freedom can be written down by Black people who benefit from perpetuating them. In his essay "Black is a Country" (1962), Baraka derisively refers to supposedly compromised and dissembling Black figures as "official Negroes." Thus, in a more radical literary context, the lies aren’t only related to white people.
Historical Context
The history of Langston Hughes makes it possible to read this poem in connection with his experiences growing up. In The Big Sea, Hughes discusses his childhood and confronting racism both in and out of school. "Kids would grab stones and tin cans out of the alley and chase me home," writes Hughes. As with the speaker of "Children's Rhymes," Hughes was aware he was not "sent" the same hopes and privileges as the white children he went to school with.
The focus on the expression and oppression of Black people wasn't limited to literary and artistic spheres. In the world at large, Black people and their allies began to protest the grave racial inequalities in American society. In a sense, the speaker in "Children's Rhymes" links to those historical figures who spoke out against racism and asserted the truth about the United States.
The poem was first published in 1951 and later revised and published in 1967. These were two crucial decades for the civil rights movement. In the mid-1950s, a Black Alabama woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the front of the bus to a white person. This led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama. In the ’60s, Martin Luther King Jr. led activists from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregation and reassert the right of Black people to vote. Thus, "Children's Rhymes" is a part of a critical political moment in which citizens began to confront and correct the lies that are noted by the poem's speaker.
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By Langston Hughes
