Quote by Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”

What happens to a hope or goal you keep being forced to postpone? Hughes asks this with terrifying simplicity — suggesting that denied dreams do not simply wait patiently but shrivel, fester, or eventually explode. The question is also a warning about what a society creates when it systematically denies people their aspirations.

Harlem was published in 1951, as Black Americans were fighting for civil rights in a deeply segregated country. The Korean War was underway, and Black servicemen who had risked their lives for democracy were returning home to Jim Crow laws and systematic exclusion from the postwar prosperity being celebrated everywhere else.

American poet, social activist, and leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance whose work celebrated Black American life with warmth, irony, and political urgency. His poetry collections, including The Weary Blues, and his play Mulatto brought Black experience to the center of American literary life.