If we must die, o let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain...
Nevertheless, Langston Hughes made it clear that his bitter
hostility was aimed at injustice and inhumanity and not at
American ideals when he wrote:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath-
America will bel
An ever-living seed,
Its dream
Lies deep in the heart of me.
Besides articulating the Negro's emotional reaction to
prejudice and discrimination, the Negro Renaissance depicted
other aspects of the Afro-American culture. The flavor of its
religious life was captured best by James Weldon Johnson in his
volume "God's Trombones: Negro Sermons in Verse", which he
published in 1927. Instead of resorting to the standard technique
of using stereotyped dialect to capture the flavor, Johnson used
powerful, poetic imagery to express its essence. In "The
Creation" Johnson depicted a Negro minister preaching on the
opening verses of Genesis:
And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely-
I'll make me a world.
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