-Langston Hughes
This month each year, we take time to highlight the histories of Black people and the history of America in light of the contributions of those Americans who are Black. In our current Social Studies learning, we are focusing on the lives of those important Americans who created the Harlem Renaissance and began movements in literature, music, visual art, and more that infused our American landscape with such valuable emotion, color, and life.
Knowing the contributions of those of us who came before helps all of us to understand our place in a lineage. We are better able to take up the responsibilities of today when we know the greatness of those who came before. Knowing these histories supports us in feeling and realizing the potential around us. Hughes' quote above highlights the importance of our studying the Harlem Renaissance, Jazz & Blues Music, and the Literature that the great Black artists developed during this time in history. These art forms highlight and connect experience, prejudice, overcoming, struggle, and triumph in the midst of multiple forms of discrimination and hardship. In doing so, they do certainly "interpret beauty" of all people - indeed, "the beauty within themselves."
I often tell my students the story of one of my teachers who taught me the beauty of dedicated perseverance with the Langston Hughes poem, Mother to Son. My 7th grade teacher, Mrs. Etheredge suffered from Multiple Sclerosis, and had to be absent for long stretches of time the year that I was in her English class. Throughout this time, she shared some of her struggle when she would return to school after being gone for long stretches of time. I remember when she returned once, she brought to us this poem, assigned us the task of memorizing it, and analyzing it together. As we did, we found spaces for all of us to exist within the message of perseverance in the poem. After studying it for sometime, we created our own whole class art installation of a staircase of our own out of paper on the back wall of the classroom. Each of us created a paper cut-out of ourselves with a personal goal written on it. We all placed ourselves at the bottom of the staircase to start, but as we took steps toward our given goal, we progressed upward until we each reached the top of the paper staircase.
Though a simple representation, I very vividly remember the staircase and the poem that sparked a room of 12 year olds to see the beauty within ourselves, within our individual struggles. I'm grateful for those artists from the Harlem Renaissance who had the gumption and courage to truly express what is, what was, and visions of what could be.
I'm hopeful, this Black History Month, that we can all find the inspiration and motivation we seek to live into the corners of the world that is and begin the small changes necessary to keep creating the world we wish to see, together.
Enjoy the poem.
Mother to Son by Langston Hughes
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
Langston Hughes, "Mother to Son" from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Copyright © 2002 by Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc.
