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Similar I - Too - Am America, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, The Weary Blues, I Hear America Singing, I Am the Darker Brother | ||
I, Too (1945), published in "The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes", demonstrates a yearning for equality through perseverance while disproving the idea that patriotism is limited by race. Langston Hughes, in writing this poem and many others, helped define the Harlem Renaissance, a period in the early 1920s and 30s of newfound cultural identity for blacks in America who had discovered the power of literature, art, music, and poetry as a means of personal and collective expression in the scope of civil rights.
In the poem, Hughes describes a ubiquitous racial oppression that degrades African Americans at the time. He writes from the perspective of an inferior servant to a domineering white family that shoos him away to the kitchen whenever company arrives.