This article (or essay?) reflects on Langston Hughes’s poetry. While Hughes is celebrated for his lyrical portrayals of everyday life and his role as a Harlem Renaissance pioneer, the essay centres on his 1938 poem The Kids Who Die, which denounces systemic oppression and commemorates the young lives lost in struggles for justice. Connecting Hughes’s historical context to contemporary realities of war, displacement, and violence against children, the piece challenges readers, parents, caretakers, and scholars to rethink how we read poetry and confront dreadful truths about children’s welfare.
A while ago, I came across Langston Hughes while visiting a friend of mine. With no intention of finding something to read but distracting myself, I started skipping through her library as she was attending a phone call. To my surprise and pleasure, I found The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1994). At first, it seemed like just another anthology, but as I began reading, I realized something uncanny: Hughes’s poetry, written nearly a century ago, still captures the horrors of social injustice that continue to haunt us today.
Hughes, also known as the people’s poet, was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. From an early age, he found refuge in words and with the sensitivity of a young artist, he started writing poetry in his high school years, travelled around the world and later graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, after publishing his first book, Weary Blues in 1926 (History, 2023)—a delightful story of a young talent.
So at this point you’re probably wondering: what does this have to do with children — and whose children are we really talking about? Is Sliding clickbaiting its readers? Well, if you are like me, ignorant of who he was, but curious enough to read how all of this is connected, I invite you to buckle up and prepare to enter a space for reflection between poetry, history and horror.
As you might know, this month’s theme is horror, so I took my chance to present to you not the kind of horror that depicts ghosts and ghouls but the horror that Hughes exposed through verse: the terror of racism, poverty, and inequality, to reflect in the way these realities continue to shape children’s lives.
Having that in mind, let’s go back to my initial story: once I found the book, I looked through the table of contents, as one does, and I found a list of poems aimed at children. It was a lucky day for me in which I found both a literary jewel and some inspo for my next article. Some of the golden_autumn_leaves titles that I found were Thanksgiving time, Autumn thought, and Mister Sandman. Perfect for this time of the year.
Later that day, and once I was home, I looked for some more relevant poems for children written by L.H., and while doing that, I bumped into a poem about kids. Not necessarily for kids, but certainly about kids. The kids who die. I’ll leave here a fragment of this intense poem for you, but if you prefer to experience it first-hand and thoroughly, click here.
Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi
Organizing sharecroppers.
Kids will die in the streets of Chicago
Organizing workers.
Kids will die in the orange groves of California
Telling others to get together.
Whites and Filipinos,
Negroes and Mexicans,
All kinds of kids will die
Who don’t believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment
And a lousy peace.
Written in 1938, this powerful poem commemorates the young lives lost in struggles for justice and denounces systemic racial oppression as a wake-up call for those who live—those who remain alive. One of the reasons this passage is especially striking is the way it foregrounds children as targets of violence but also as active participants in movements for change.
This piece, inspired by American history during the Jim Crow period, expresses a rebellious spirit against repression that still resonates in today’s world events. For different motives, the sentiment continues to arise around the globe: the children in Gaza dealing with starvation after innumerous bombings, or the kids in refugee camps across the Middle East and Africa, or the ones at high risk in migration routes in the Americas and Europe, or the ones separated from their families by ICE in U.S.A, or the ones in war regions like Ukraine or Sudan, and the list goes on and on. In a world in which kids die facing cruelty, war, starvation, and displacement, the horrors that they have had to face in real life have always surpassed fiction.
The kids who die was and still is a reality. It keeps happening both mediatized and ignored, sensationalized and muted. L.H. poetry allows us to go back to what we should never be desensitized to, and I’m here to share that with you.
Unfortunately, and for humanity’s detriment, the kids who die didn’t transform into an allegory of the past, nor can they be interpreted as the nostalgia of a deceased childhood placed in better times. The kids who die was and still is a reality. It keeps happening both mediatized and ignored, sensationalized and muted. L.H. poetry allows us to go back to what we should never be desensitized to, and I’m here to share that with you.
Now that both of us have managed to make it to this point, me trying to make you a bit uncomfortable with reality, and you openly going through this ride, I want us as adult readers —I assume we are— and stakeholder of children’s welfare, be that parents, caretakers, children’s literature scholar, or media scholar; to sit with ourselves and the horrific reality some children face. And then, later learn about what kind of real actions we can take, whether that is translated into activism, education, policy making, and even the stories —or poetry— we choose to amplify.
Finally, I would like to be more appreciative of your readership and share with you a more positive poem inspired by L.H.’s and written by Aja Monet –a teacher, contemporary poet, and American activist– called For the kids who lived. The poet invites action to defend children’s most basic and discussed right: the right to live. I leave you with this strong piece here to carry forward.
Bibliograpy
- History (2023) Langston Hughes. https://www.history.com/articles/langston-hughes
- Hughes, L. (1994).The collected poems of Langston Hughes (Eds. A. Rampersad & D. Roessel).Knopf.
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