Freedom's Plow
Freedom's Plow
The plow plowed a new furrow across the field of history. Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped.

Freedom’s Plow honors the Langston Hughes poem of the same name:

A long time ago,
An enslaved people heading toward freedom
Made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
The plow plowed a new furrow
Across the field of history.
Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped.

(1943)

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1901. He was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic, cultural, and intellectual reformation of Black people that began in Harlem, New York during the 1920s. His physical position in Harlem, and his cultural leadership as an advocate, columnist, essayist, poet, and writer, allowed him audience with Lorraine Hansberry, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. He and James Baldwin also critiqued each other’s works.

Hughes’s works showcased the daily lives of the Black American working class. He published his first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in The Crisis, an NAACP publication. The possession of a strong Black identity was core to his works. Among his extensive portfolio are “I, Too,” “The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain,” and “Mother to Son.”

According to Poetry Foundation, “it was Hughes’ belief in humanity and his hope for a world in which people could sanely and with understanding live together that led to his decline in popularity in the racially turbulent latter years of his life.” He died in 1967 from prostate cancer.

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