The Panther & the Lash

I am captured by Langston Hughes, he is a man who writes poetry that could rock you even if you didn't agree. This is what poetry is for, to create a movement in a place where stagnant waters gather. I wish that we all could say racism and hatred were just things of the past...but we can't, because they are not. When we grow to understand one race more accurately then we begin to separate and distort (many times extort) another. Fear of the unknown should not grip the way it does, for the unknown is just beauty waiting to be seen. This beauty cannot express itself through our knowledge of the way things should go, but we need to grasp the understanding that it is amazing and created by God not to be seen and classified through our myopic eyes. But through His eyes...Then we could see the anointing in it all, that really...God chose to make us all different because he does not see things through our tunneled minds.

PANTHER AND THE LASH was written about a year before Langston Hughes died. It consist of verse written during the 60's and verse from earlier works of the 20's, 30's , and 40's with titles that were suppose to divide the book into sections: "Words on Fire," "American Heartbreak," "The Bible Belt," "The Face of the War," "African Question Mark," "Dinner Guest: Me," and "Daybreak in Alabama." The poems reflect the desires, tears, heartbreak, sometimes hope, and anger of a black American community. Also, none were specifically designed to be performed in a particualar method, just simply read with the hope that the reader would gain some type of enlightenment from the words. The earlier poems of thirty years or more before those written for the PANTHER... show that Hughes was well ahead of his time long before the black power and black is beautiful movements that would come to characterized the 1960s. Moreover, they would probably place Hughes lifelong political philosophy somewhere on a scale between Martin Luther King Jr. and a post-Mecca/after Nation of Islam Malcolm X (the Malcolm X who understood that not all white people are enemies). Even today, the poems cannot be entirely dismissed as belonging to a specific time and place when in some instances the words still hold currently true as when they were first written in whatever decade. Work that holds its own against the tests of time, as most of Langston Hughes' work, is work of definite quality. Such is the genius of Langston Hughes! Langston Hughes was proudly black and understandably closeted gay and far from being stereotypically effete. Hughes often felt exploited and humiliated by his publishers and the larger white community who he generally did not like. Nevertheless, he did acknowledge that some whites could be and were trusted friends in a desired and shared equality and fight for equality. This latter is important to remember since to appeal to a larger audience, Hughes is often presented as a grinning and non-threating Uncle Tom which he "most definitely was not." Langston Hughes was not passive in much of his body of work on race and social issues as a result of having to deal with the blatent injustices of racism and the deceptive smiles often masking it-- then as now. The best summation of the work of Langston Hughes were probably his own words, "My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind."