Mother to Son

Langston Hughes’s 1922 poem “Mother to Son” was written for the civil rights magazine The Crisis and later published in Hughes’s first book, The Weary Blues (1926). The poem’s speaker, a mother, addresses her son in a lecture about perseverance and hope. The mother describes her difficult life and the painful obstacles she has faced, turning her struggles into a lesson of inspiration and encouragement for her son. Utilizing the metaphor of a staircase, the poem touches on themes such as racial inequality, poverty, and trauma. Hughes was a prominent influence in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote extensively on racial oppression against Black Americans. The speaker represents the Black American mother, resilient and strong yet often underestimated and overlooked, as she raises the next generation of Black men in an oppressive society that will marginalize and traumatize them. As a mother does for her child, she insists that with ruthless determination and tireless work, there is still hope.

Poet Biography

Born in Joplin, Missouri in February 1901, James Mercer Langston Hughes grew up in a series of Midwestern towns and began writing prolifically at a young age. Both of Hughes’s paternal great-grandmothers were enslaved, and both of his paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners, creating a fraught relationship with his ancestry and his racial identity.