W. Jason Miller – författare

Langston Hughes never knew of an America where lynching was absent from the cultural landscape. Jason Miller investigates the nearly three dozen poems written by Hughes on the subject of lynching to explore its varying effects on survivors, victims, and accomplices as they resisted, accepted, and executed this brutal form of sadistic torture.

Starting from Hughes''s life as a teenager during the Red Summer of 1919 and moving through the civil rights movement that took place toward the end of Hughes''s life, Miller initiates an important dialogue between America''s neglected history of lynching and some of the world’s most significant poems.

This extended study of the centrality of these heinous acts to Hughes''s artistic development, aesthetics, and activism represents a significant and long-overdue contribution to our understanding of the art and politics of Langston Hughes.

Since Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, some scholars have privately suspected that King’s “dream” was connected to Langston Hughes’s poetry. Drawing on archival materials, including notes, correspondence, and marginalia, W. Jason Miller provides a completely original and compelling argument that Hughes’s influence on King’s rhetoric was, in fact, evident in more than just the one famous speech.

King’s staff had been wiretapped by J. Edgar Hoover and suffered accusations of communist influence, so quoting or naming the leader of the Harlem Renaissance—who had his own reputation as a communist—would only have intensified the threats against the civil rights activist. Thus, the link was purposefully veiled through careful allusions in King’s orations. In Origins of the Dream, Miller lifts that veil and shows how Hughes’s revolutionary poetry became a measurable inflection in King’s voice. He contends that by employing Hughes’s metaphors in his speeches, King negotiated a political climate that sought to silence the poet’s subversive voice. By separating Hughes’s identity from his poems, King helped the nation unconsciously embrace the incendiary ideas behind his poetry.