Good Morning, Revolution Quotes

“I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
for the world to become good
and beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
and cut the world in two—
and see what worms are eating
at the rind.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Nine Negro boys in Alabama were on trial for their lives when I got back from Cuba and Haiti. The famous Scottsboro "rape" case was in full session. I visited those boys in the death house at Kilby Prison, and I wrote many poems about them. One of those poems was:

CHRIST IN ALABAMA

Christ is a Nigger,
Beaten and black--
O, bare your back.

Mary is His Mother--
Mammy of the South,
Silence your mouth.

God's His Father--
White Master above,
Grant us your love.

Most holy bastard
Of the bleeding mouth:
Nigger Christ
On the cross of the South.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“To an American Negro living in the northern part of the United States the word South has an unpleasant sound, an overtone of horror and of fear. For it is in the South that our ancestors were slaves for three hundred years, bought and sold like cattle. It is in the South today that we suffer the worst forms of racial persecution and economic exploitation--segregation, peonage, and lynching. It is in the Southern states that the color line is hard and fast, Jim Crow rules, and I am treated like a dog. Yet it is in the South that two-thirds of my people live: A great Black Belt stretching from Virginia to Texas, across the cotton plantations of Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, down into the orange groves of Florida and the sugar cane lands of Louisiana. It is in the South that black hands create the wealth that supports the great cities--Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, where the rich whites live in fine houses on magnolia-shaded streets and the Negroes live in slums restricted by law. It is in the South that what the Americans call the "race problem" rears its ugly head the highest and, like a snake with its eyes on a bird, holds the whole land in its power. It is in the South that hate and terror walk the streets and roads by day, sometimes quiet, sometimes violent, and sleep n the beds with the citizens at night.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“The boss's got all he needs, certainly,
Eats swell,
Owns a lotta houses,
Goes vacationin',
Breaks strikes,
Runs politics, bribes police,
Pays off congress,
And struts all over the earth--

But me, I ain't never had enough to eat.
Me, I ain't never been warm in winter.
Me, I ain't never known security--
All my life, been livin' hand to mouth,
Hand to mouth.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“I am so tired of waiting. Aren't you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“So goes the life of social poet. I am sure none of these things would ever have happened to me had I limited the subject matter of my poems to roses and moonlight. But, unfortunately, I was born poor--and colored--and almost all the prettiest roses I have seen have been in rich white people's yards--not in mine. That is why I cannot write exclusively about roses and moonlight--for sometimes in the moonlight my brothers see a fiery cross and a circle of Klansmen's hoods. Sometimes in the moonlight a dark body sways from a lynching tree--but for his funeral there are no roses.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“That evening there were police outside the building in which I spoke, and in the air the rising tension of race that is peculiar to the South. It had been rumored that some of the local citizenry were saying that I should be run out of town, and that one of the sheriffs agreed, saying, "Sure, he ought to be run out! It's bad enough to call Christ a bastard. But when he calls him a nigger, he's gone too far!"...

...Nevertheless, I remember with pleasure the courtesy and kindness of many of the students and faculty at Chapel Hill and their lack of agreement with the anti-Negro elements of the town. There I began to learn at the University of North Carolina how hard it is to be a white liberal in the South.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Poets who write mostly about love, roses and moonlight, sunsets and snow, must lead a very quiet life. Seldom, I imagine, does their poetry get them into difficulties. Beauty and lyricism are really related to another world, to ivory towers, to your head in the clouds, feet floating off the earth. Unfortunately, having been born poor--and also colored--in Missouri, I was stuck in the mud from the beginning. Try as I might to float off into the clouds, poverty and Jim Crow would grab me by the heels, and right back on earth I would land.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“All the problems known to the Jews today in Hitler's Germany, we who are Negroes know here in America--with one difference. Here we may speak openly about our problems, write about them, protest, and seek to better our conditions. In Germany the Jews may do none of these things. Democracy permits us the freedom of a hope, and some action towards the realization of that hope.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“On the train I had a lot of time to think. I thought how in the thirty years of my life I had seldom gotten on a train in America without being conscious of my color. In the South, there are Jim Crow cars and Negroes must ride separate from the whites, usually in a filthy antiquated coach next to the engine, getting all the smoke and bumps and dirt. In the South, we cannot buy sleeping car tickets. Such comforts are only for white folks. And in the North where segregated travel is not the law, colored people have, nevertheless, many difficulties. In auto buses they must take the seats in the rear, over the wheels. On the boats they must occupy the worst cabins. The ticket agents always say that all other accommodations are sold. On trains, if one sits down by a white person, the white person will sometimes get up, flinging back an insult at the Negro who has dared to take a seat beside him. Thus it is that in America, if you are yellow, brown, or black, you can never travel anywhere without being reminded of your color, and oft-times suffering great inconveniences.

I sat in the comfortable sleeping car on my first day out of Moscow and remembered many things about trips I had taken in America. I remembered how, once as a youngster going alone to see my father who was working in Mexico, I went into the dining car of the train to eat. I sat down at a table with a white man. The man looked at me and said, "You're a nigger, ain't you?" and left the table. It was beneath his dignity to eat with a Negro child. At St. Louis I went onto the station platform to buy a glass of milk. The clerk behind the counter said, “We don't serve niggers," and refused to sell me anything. As I grew older I learned to expect this often when traveling. So when I went South to lecture on my poetry at Negro universities, I carried my own food because I knew I could not go into the dining cars. Once from Washington to New Orleans, I lived all the way on the train on cold food. I remembered this miserable trip as I sat eating a hot dinner on the diner of the Moscow-Tashkent express.

Traveling South from New York, at Washington, the capital of our country, the official Jim Crow begins. There the conductor comes through the train and, if you are a Negro, touches you on the shoulder and says, "The last coach forward is the car for colored people." Then you must move your baggage and yourself up near the engine, because when the train crosses the Potomac River into Virginia, and the dome of the Capitol disappears, it is illegal any longer for white people and colored people to ride together. (Or to eat together, or sleep together, or in some places even to work together.) Now I am riding South from Moscow and am not Jim-Crowed, and none of the darker people on the train with me are Jim-Crowed, so I make a happy mental note in the back of my mind to write home to the Negro papers: "There is no Jim Crow on the trains of the Soviet Union.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“I'm looking for a house
In the world
Where white shadows
Will not fall.

There is no such house,
Dark brother,
No such house
At all.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Have luncheon there this afternoon, all you jobless.

Why not?

Dine with some of the men and women who got rich off of your labor, who clip coupons with clean white fingers because your hands dug coal, drilled stone, sewed garments, poured steel to let other people draw dividends and live easy.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“They will let you have dope
Because they are quite willing
To drug you or kill you.

They will let you have babies
Because they are quite willing
To pauperize you--
Or use your kids as labor boys
For army, air force, or uranium mine.

They will let you have alcohol
To make you sodden and drunk
And foolish.

They will gleefully let you
Kill your damn self any way you choose
With liquor, drugs, or whatever.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“There stands the white man,
Boss of the fields--
Lord of the land
And all that it yields.

Here bend the black folks,
Hands to the soil--
Bosses of nothing.
Not even their toil.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“I have, personally, the greatest respect for sincere religionists, but none whatsoever for professional racketeers in religion, nor for those who use religion as an anti-labor, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro, anti-democratic weapon for thwarting the progress of the common man or minorities among them.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Sure I know you!
You're a White Man.
I'm a Negro.
You take all the best jobs
And leave us the garbage cans to empty and
The halls to clean.
You have a good time in a big house at
Palm Beach
And rent us the back alleys
And the dirty slums.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Is your name spelled C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-T?
Are you always a White Man?”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“I would like to see an America where people of any race, color or creed may live on a plane of cultural, material well-being, cooperating unhindered by sectarian, racial, or factional prejudices that do nobody any good.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“I live on a park bench,
You, Park Avenue.
Hell of a distance
Between us two.

I beg a dime for dinner--
You got a butler and maid.
But I'm wakin' up!
Say, ain't you afraid

That I might, just maybe,
In a year or two,
Move on over
To Park Avenue?”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“And now, in Madrid, Spain's besieged capital, I've met wide-awake Negroes from various parts of the world--New York, our Middle West, the French West Indies, Cuba, Africa--some stationed here, others on leave from their battalions--all of them here because they know that if Fascism creeps across Spain, across Europe, and then across the world, there will be no place left for intelligent young Negroes at all. In fact, no decent place for any Negroes--because Fascism preaches the creed of Nordic supremacy and a world for whites alone.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Mortal frailty, greed, and error, know no boundary lines. The explosives of war do not care whose hands fashion them. Certainly, both Marxists and Christians can be cruel. Would that Christ came back to save us all. We do not know how to save ourselves.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Writing is the urge to tell folks about it. About what? About what hurts you inside. Colored folks, through the sheer fact of being colored, have got plenty hurting them inside. You see, we, too, are one of those minority races the newspapers are always talking about. Except that we are here in America, not in Europe, fourteen million of us--a rather large minority, but still a minority.

Now, what's hurting us? Well, Jim Crow is hurting us. Ghettos, and segregation, and lack of jobs is hurting us. Signs up: COLORED TRADE NOT DESIRED, and dirty names such as the Jews know under Hitler hurt us. So those of us who are writers have plenty to tell the world about.

To us democracy is a paradox, full of contradictions.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“So, in summary: The market for Negro writers is very limited. Jobs as professional writers, editorial assistants, publisher's readers, etc., are almost non-existent. Hollywood insofar as Negroes are concerned, might just as well be controlled by Hitler. The common courtesies of decent travel, hotel and restaurant accommodations, politeness from doormen, elevatormen, and hired attendants in public places is practically everywhere in America denied Negroes, whether they be writers or not. Black authors, too, must ride in Jim Crow cars.

These are some of our problems. What can you who are writers do to help us solve them? What can you, our public, do to help us solve them? My problem, your problem. No, I'm wrong! It is not a matter of mine and yours. It is a matter of ours. We are all Americans. We want to create the American dream, a finer and more democratic America. I cannot do it without you. You cannot do it omitting me. Can we march together then?

But perhaps the word march is the wrong word—suggesting soldiers and armies. Can we not put our heads together and think and plan—not merely dream—the future America? And then create it with our hands? A land where even a Negro writer can make a living, if he is a good writer. And where, being a Negro, he need not be a secondary American.

We do not want any secondary Americans. We do not want a weak and imperfect democracy. We do not want poverty and hunger and prejudice and fear on the part of any portion of our population. We want America to really be America for everybody. Let us make it so!”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Dream of Freedom

There’s a dream in the land
With its back against the wall.
By muddled names and strange
Sometimes the dream is called.

There are those who claim
This dream for theirs alone—
A sin for which, we know
They must atone.

Unless shared in common
Like sunlight and like air,
The dream will die for lack
Of substance anywhere.

The dream knows no frontier or tongue,
The dream no class or race.
The dream cannot be kept secure
In any one locked place.

This dream today embattled,
With its back against the wall—
To save the dream for one,
It must be saved for ALL.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“And expose war. And the old My-Country-'Tis-of' Thee lie. And the colored American Legion posts strutting around talking about the privilege of dying for the noble Red, White, and Blue, when they aren't even permitted the privilege of living for it. Or voting for it in Texas. Or working for it in the diplomatic service. Or even rising, like every other good little boy, from the log cabin to the White House.

White House is right.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“There are some very stupid men in the capitals of the Western World--the more stupid because they think they are so wise. It would seem to me that almost anybody would know by now that colored peoples do not like to be ruled by outside forces, Jim Crowed, segregated, told what to do by aliens, and in general kicked around.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Let guns alone salute
The wisdom of our age
With dusty powder marks
On yet another page of history.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Hey you rising workers everywhere greetings”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“We represent the end of race. And the Fascists know that when there is no more race, there will be no more capitalism, and no more war, and no more money for the munition makers, because the workers of the world will have triumphed.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“We Negroes of America are tired of a world divided superficially on the basis of blood and color, but in reality on the basis of poverty and power—the rich over the poor, no matter what their color. We Negroes of America are tired of a world in which it is possible for any group of people to say to another: "You have no right to happiness, or freedom, or the joy of life." We are tired of a world where forever we work for someone else and the profits are not ours. We are tired of a world where, when we raise our voices against oppression, we are immediately jailed, intimidated, beaten, sometimes lynched. Nicolás GuiIlén has been in prison in Cuba, Jacques Roumain, in Haiti, Angelo Herndon in the United States. Today a letter comes from the great Indian writer, Raj Anand, saying that he cannot be with us here in Paris because the British police in England have taken his passport from him. I say, we darker peoples of the earth are tired of a world in which things like that can happen.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings