Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” (1951) considers the potential consequences of white society’s withholding of equal opportunity from African Americans, encapsulated in the poem’s opening line: “What happens to a dream deferred?” Rather than answering this question with direct statements, the poem makes skillful use of simile to present additional questions and one conjecture, all the while alluding to important events in African American history. In particular, its ominous last line—“Or does it explode?”—has been interpreted to refer to the population booms of the Great Migration, race riots, and the emerging civil rights movement.
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