The voices of Racial Pride of being Black in Langston Hughes’ Poems

Poetry is “imagery gardens with real toads in them.” It means that poetry is something full of imagery, but it is the expression of the poet’s feeling. The poets try to express what actually they feel and what come up in their mind. The poets also express their feeling based on their experience in reality. One of poet’s experiences expressed in their literary works is racial issues. Hughes is also a poet who wrote about racial issues. Using his own characteristic in poetic language, Langston Hughes explores his point of view toward Black’s life condition. He believes that black people are actually able to reach their dream, get many things like what white people get, do many things like what the white do. He writes poems that express his pride of being black. Due to this, the writer then proposed two problems: 1) what are the racial pride found in Langston Hughes’ poems? 2) how does the voice expresses racial pride through Langston Hughes’ eight poems? In order to make the elaboration arguable, reasonable, and justifiable, the writer also has chosen structuralism theory of literary criticism to be constructed as theoretical standpoint as well as the approach to solve the problems. The result of this research was from the eight poems in this research are divided into three themes, they are: black’ dream, black race, and the self-confidence. In these three themes, the author has the main focus to the black’s race. There are two poems included into black’s dream theme. The poems are Dream Variation and Harlem. There are two poems concern with the second theme. The poems are Trumpet Player and Me and Mule. Besides, Hughes also expresses his criticism to the blacks. The third theme, self- confidence, consists of four poems, they are; Negro Speaks of Rivers, Theme for English B, Mother to Son, and Walker with the Dawn. Langston Hughes expresses his pride through several characteristics of poetic expression in his eight poems. Those characteristics are: 1)the use of dictions which are clear, easy to be understood, and closely related to the racial issues, such as: negro, blacks, white, Abe Lincoln, trumpet player, America, and Harlem. 2) The use of repetitions enhances the several messages of the poems and 3) The use of symbols as the figurative language, which is clear, contains the meaning related to the blacks’ life. However, the most important thing is that Hughes’s way to deliver racial issues is mainly based on the two main reasons. First, a poem is an expression of his point of view of life in the relation to the blacks’ life. Second, it is a reflection of his view that poem is one of many ways to express the feeling of the reality of life