Mother to Son

After the end of the American Civil War, more than six million Black Americans moved out of the rural South and into urban cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. Racial segregation, discrimination, and Jim Crow laws in the American South were primary factors that led to this massive movement, known as The Great Migration. These factors made Black American life incredibly difficult following the end of slavery, and many people felt compelled to start over new in places that didn’t hold the same entrenched views about race and offered better economic opportunities. In these cities, Black people began to thrive in flourishing communities of art, literature, and music. Black neighborhoods all over the United States saw a massive cultural boom, experiencing economic success, creating influential communities of their own. The Harlem neighborhood in New York City was a hub for Black migrants fleeing the South, and it was also home to many educated intellectuals with a growing middle class. However, these Northern cities still harbored prevalent racism, and many Black men returning home from World War I were only met with disrespect and devaluation by the country they gave their lives for. This led to a period of race riots and civil uprisings, most notably the Red Summer of 1919. This particularly violent summer inspired Claude McKay’s sonnet “If We Must Die,” which is considered by many to be the first official literary work of the Harlem Renaissance.

Although the literary movement was gaining traction before McKay’s poem was published, the poem’s tone and political concerns set the standard for the kind of revolutionary intellectualism that Harlem Renaissance writers and artists were famous for; they challenged every culturally entrenched stereotype concerning African Americans. Alaine Locke published The New Negro, an anthology now considered a cornerstone for Harlem Renaissance literature and the genre of African American literature as a whole. The anthology featured many quintessential Harlem Renaissance writers that are still widely regarded and studied in classrooms today, like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, and Jean Toomer. Jazz and blues music was exploding in popularity, Black artists and playwrights were producing groundbreaking work, and Harlem was at the center of all of this cultural growth. Langston Hughes is a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, developing the genre of jazz poetry and often utilizing Black colloquial speech and musical elements in his work. This is clear in his poem “Mother to Son,” with its bluesy diction, lyrical quality, and tangible rhythm.