o
o
o
Mark your confusion.
Purposefully annotate the article (1-2 mature, thoughtful responses per page to what the author is saying)
Write a response to the article.
New D.C. museum of African-American history highlights Hughes poem by
Smithsonian.com, adapted by Newsela staff, 9/29/16
There is a sentence chiseled in large engraved letters on the wall of the newly opened National
Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.: “I, too, am
America.”
It is the last line of a poem called "I, Too" by African-American poet Langston Hughes, first published in
1926.
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed —
I, too, am America.
From "The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes." By permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.
The poem is an important affirmation of the museum’s mission to tell the history of United States through
the lens of the African-American experience. It embodies that history at a particular point in the early 20th
century when Jim Crow laws throughout the South enforced racial segregation; and it argues against those
who would deny that importance — and that presence.
Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enacted by white southerners after they lost the Civil War in 1865.
The laws, which were designed both to oppress blacks and keep them separate from whites, continued to
be enforced until 1965.
Poetic Subtleties
The poem captures a series of intertwined themes about the relationship of African-Americans to the
majority white culture and society.
There is a pun in the title, "I, Too" in the lines that open and close the poem. If you hear the word as the
number, "two," it suddenly seems that Hughes is referring to himself as secondary, or even inferior.
Hughes speaks powerfully for people who are excluded. The poem portrays African-Americans coming in
from out of sight, eating in the kitchen. It shows them taking their place at the dining room table as equals
with the “company” that is dining.
Hughes doesn’t say who owns the kitchen. The house represents the United States. Hughes refers to the
African-Americans who worked in the plantation houses as slaves and servants. They lived below stairs or
in the cabins, and were often made to keep out of sight of the slave owners. Still, the presence of AfricanAmericans was obvious from the smooth running of the house, the appearance of meals on the table, and
other tasks that they performed.
Divided In Two
Hughes left another reference for hearing “too” as “two” in the poem. The listener could think of "two" not
as being secondary, but being divided.
Hughes was paying tribute to another writer of the time, the intellectual leader and founder of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, W.E.B. DuBois, whose speeches and essays about the
dividedness of African-American identity and consciousness helped to empower the Civil Rights Movement
of the mid-20th century.
According to DuBois in his influential work, "The Souls of Black Folks," the African-American existed always
in two "places" at once:
“One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;
two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
The idea of this "two-ness" is referred to in the second stanza, or section, of Hughes’ poem: “I am the
darker brother.”
The sense of being divided in two was a problem not just for African-Americans, but for the United States.
As Lincoln said about trying to have slavery at the same time as freedom, “A house divided against itself
cannot stand.”
A Reference To Another Writer
Hughes ties together this sense of the unity of the separate parts of the American democracy with a
reference to the great American poet of the 1800s, Walt Whitman.
Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric.” In the poem, he connected the power of that body with all the
virtues of American democracy, seeing each individual as having basic rights, and as having the power to
act together with their fellow citizens. Whitman believed that the “electricity” of the body formed a kind of
glue that would bind people together in companionship and love. Another one of his poems begins, “I hear
America singing, the varied carols I hear ...”
Hughes references this line, in a more openly political way when he says, “I, too, sing America.”
The verb here is important because it brings up the idea of all the creative work that African-Americans
provided to make America, which was understood, but never spoken about. African-Americans helped sing
America into existence, and for that work they deserve a seat at the table, dining as coequals with their
fellows.
At the end of the poem, the line is changed because the transformation has occurred.
“I, too, am America.”
The presence of African-Americans has been established and recognized. The problem for the politics of
all this is the simple statement "They’ll see how beautiful I am ...” may not be enough.
The new African-American museum on the National Mall is a powerful statement about the presence of a
story that is unique, tragic and an important part of American history.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Possible response options:
● How will the African American perspective on this time period (1865-1965) be different than the white perspective?
Explain.
● What does this line, “I, too, am America,” mean to you? Why did the museum choose this line? Explain.
● Select any passage and respond to it.