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The Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes first published “Mother to Son” in 1922, in the civil rights-oriented magazine The Crisis, which helped establish his legacy as a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance refers to a major explosion of Black intellectual and artistic activity that erupted in the 1920s. Though centered on the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, the Renaissance had an international reach that witnessed the flowering of Black intellectual discourse, literature, visual art, music, and fashion. All these forms of cultural and artistic production sought to challenge racism, subvert predominant stereotypes, and develop a progressive new politics that advanced Black peoples and promoted integration. At the center of the Harlem Renaissance stood the figure known as the New Negro. The “Old Negro” remained hampered by the historical trauma of slavery. The “New Negro,” by contrast, possesses a renewed sense of self, purpose, and pride. Langston Hughes contributed to this vision of the New Negro through his poetry. In works like “Mother to Son” he features a speaker who reflects on the difficult circumstances of Black life in racist America, but who is nonetheless resolute in her commitment to persevere.

Black Feminism

Hughes’s poem preceded the formal development of Black feminism by about fifty years, which means that “Mother to Son” wasn’t technically influenced by this intellectual movement. Even so, Black feminism offers a theoretical framework that’s very helpful for contextualizing the speaker’s identity position as a working-class Black woman. In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement broadly aimed to end many forms of institutionalized discrimination against Black people. In the wake of that movement, there arose a more focused effort to think about the unique forms of discrimination experienced by Black women in U.S. society. Black women intellectuals and activists developed a philosophical paradigm now known as “Black feminism.” This paradigm emphasizes the inherent value of Black women and the urgent need for specifically Black female liberation. Perhaps the first formal statement of Black feminism appeared in 1977, when a group known as the Combahee River Collective published a statement about their work. In that statement, the Collective emphasized the difficulty of “separat[ing] race from class from sex oppression.” These three aspects of oppression—race, class, and sex—must be considered together, “because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”

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