Langston Hughes : “Theme for English B”
Fatbardha Mamudi
English Composition 2
Miraim Klein
South University

Langston Hughes was raised by his grandmother. He started writing poems at a young age. His grandmother was very passionate about reading and writing and infused Hughes with her passion. Hughes studied at Columbia for a year, but dropped out because of the racism he experienced. He traveled to Africa and Europe. Later, Hughes settled in Harlem, New York in the 1920’s. He joined the literary movement named the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes focused on educating the world about the mistreatment of African Americans from the 1920’s-1960’s.
The poem I chose to write my thesis on is “Theme For English B”. “Theme for English B” is the journey of a young student trying to discover who they are at a time when who they were was stripped from them. At the end, through a realization process, they like who they are. The poems speaker is the student.
The poem started with a teacher assigning the students an English assignment to write about themselves. The student questions the professor’s assignment. On the contrary, it is easy for the professor to assign the writing assignment about who the students are because the professor knows who he is and he is white. On the other hand, the student doesn’t really know who he or she is because they are black.
The writer raises the question of being unsure of who they are. They state things that they concretely know about themselves, such as their age and where they are from. In addition, a powerful statement was made by the writer. “I am the only colored student in my class”, he writes (Pike, Acosta, D., 2010, p 633). Hughes used five lines to symbolize the journey of discovery of self, this student embarked upon. For example, the author states, “ The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem, through a park, then I cross