“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

1921

Langston Hughes’s first published poem became an anthem for the New Negro Movement.

In 1921, long before he became a famous Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes published his first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” The poem evokes the powerful symbol of the Nile River of Ethiopia and Egypt and the equally meaningful Mississippi River that crosses the United States from North to South. Alain Locke included Hughes’s poem in his anthology The New Negro, helping it to become an anthem of the New Negro Movement