This is the official blog of Northern Arizona slam poet Christopher Fox Graham. Begun in 2002, and transferred to blogspot in 2006, FoxTheBlog has recorded more than 670,000 hits since 2009. This blog cover's Graham's poetry, the Arizona poetry slam community and offers tips for slam poets from sources around the Internet. Read CFG's full biography here. Looking for just that one poem? You know the one ... click here to find it.
Showing posts with label Martin Luther King Jr.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martin Luther King Jr.. Show all posts

Monday, January 15, 2024

"Langston" by Christopher Fox Graham

"Langston"

by Christopher Fox Graham

for one little girl
growing up in the segregated South,
Langston was her favorite 

Poet Langston Hughes signs autographs for young fans.
Photograph by Griffith J. Davis/Griffith J. Davis Photographs and Archives

in the Heart of Harlem
top floor 20 East 127th
Hughes howled for dreams deferred
in eleven revolutions 
the stinking rotten meat of Jim Crow
festering like a sore
running north from Joplin to New York
like he did
redlining himself into the Renaissance 
and a coming revolution

The Langston Hughes House is a historic home located in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City. It is an Italianate style dwelling built in 1869. It is a three story with basement, rowhouse faced in brownstone and measuring 20 feet wide and 45 feet deep. Noted African American poet and author Langston Hughes (1902–1967) occupied the top floor as his workroom from 1947 to 1967


Hughes found his home in Harlem
and “Harlem” found its home
in the anthologies and college textbooks
where the dream could sag like a heavy load


and one little girl
growing up in the segregated South,
handwrote her favorite:

“A world I dream where
               black or white,
“Whatever race you be,
“Will share the bounties of 
              the earth
“And every man is free,”



Hughes and King
the New Yorker and Alabaman
the communist and the Christian
traded stanzas and sermons

Poet Langston Hughes [Feb. 1, 1901-May 22, 1967], left, was called the father of the Harlem Renaisssance literary and arts movement. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. [Jan. 15, 1929-April 4, 1968] led the Civil Rights Movement until his assassination. Photo of Langston Hughes courtesy of Carl Van Vechten/Carl Van Vechten Trust/Beinecke Library, Yale Photo of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. courtesy of Marion S. Trikosko

In Lorraine Hansberry’s hands,
Hughes’ “Harlem” dried up
and tasted like a "Raisin in the Sun"


from the pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist,
in the heart of Montgomery
became the revolution’s war cry


in the hands 
of an Alabama preacher
with an army of churches at his back 
a dream deferred 
called all kinds of names
riding in the back end of the bus for no reason
swimming with its head deep under water
given no release

must explode

Emmitt Till in a casket
George Wallace in a doorway
John Lewis across a bridge in Selma

racial slurs from schoolchildren
like 6-year-olds always are

an army unto herself

President Barack Obama, Ruby Bridges and representatives of the Norman Rockwell Museum view Rockwell’s "The Problem We All Live With,” hanging in a West Wing hallway near the Oval Office, July 15, 2011. Bridges is the girl portrayed the painting, then 6-years-old, on her way to William Frantz Elementary School, an all-white public school, on Nov. 14, 1960, during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis. She was escorted by four deputy U.S. marshals
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza


“Emancipator looking down on demonstrators." Participants in the March on Washington in front of the Lincoln Memorial and massed along both sides of the Reflecting Pool, viewed from behind Abraham Lincoln statue” on Aug. 28, 1963. 
Photo by James K. Atherton for United Press International/Shorpy

the preacher turned revolution back into poetry
made a dream deferred into dream to come
into freedom ringing



there was one little girl
growing up in the segregated South,
who said Langston was her favorite

she collected, annotated and footnoted his poems
worn the pages rough in her collection
left bookmarks with her favorites

“Sunday Morning Prophesy”

“I, Too”


added the poems the editors omitted,
for a grandson unborn
in case he became a poet
or led a revolution

she heard him read poems, once 
killed four little girls

she heard him read poems, once
on a tour in Atlanta

sharing dreams so syrupy sweet
they would crust and sugar over
into a revolution burning
from her Atlanta
in the segregated South 
to his Harlem

Born in Joplin, Mo., Langston Hughes moved to New York City in 1947, and lived of his time in the city in the top apartment at 20 E. 127th Street in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, N.Y., until his death in May 1967. Photo by Robert W. Kelley/The Life Picture Collection


Langston spoke to her,
the way no other poet did

Langston was her favorite 
"which no one could imagine"
she said, 
a little white girl
growing up in the segregated South


she never met my son
she died 8 months before he was born
to honor him
to remember her
not for the revolution
but for their dream

Sylvia Rebie Redfield (December 14, 1925 - July 28, 2021)

of all her great-grandchilren
Langston 
would be her favorite

Thursday, October 30, 2008

The Historic Vote

I've been a fan of Sen. Barack Obama since the the Democratic National Convention in 2004. At the time, Obama was not a national name. He was described in a later news story as a senator whose grandfather had been a goat herder in Kenya. To me, that epitomized the American promise. Despite being rebellious and anti-authoritarian when authority is assumed, not earned, I am a patriot in the most idealistic sense, in the same manner as the Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine and Henry David Thoreau. We must always questions our leaders, distrust our government, and fight whatever powers - wealth, prestige, spin, sound bytes, Department of Homeland Security Threat Warnings - threaten our democracy from being anything but equal people in continuous debate.

When I was younger and cemented my political beliefs to the left, I always wondered if I would vote for a black man who was a serious contender for the presidency. Instead of an intellectual with a wealthy family like Vice President Al Gore, or a mediocre "this-is-the-best-we-could-come-up-with-on-short-notice" contender like John Kerry, we were rewarded with Barack Obama, an orator and poet who has managed to repair the chaos of the 2000 and 2004 Democratic Party fiascos and run a brilliant campaign.

Now he's so far ahead in the polls that his victory seems unlikely to falter in the next few days.

Think of it: he's black, he writes moving, poetic speeches, he's young like Kennedy, he's galvanized young voters, he grew up so poor he was on food stamps yet became a senator, he has an economic plan as we face the Second Great Depression, he beat a Clinton, then gained their support, he's a child of a foreign citizen, and from a mixed-race family that includes Kenyans, whites, and Indonesians. My vote for Barack Obama is as much for the man and his policies as it is for the honor of telling my children that I voted for him.

But what makes it more relevant is how little race has actually played in the campaign. Obama's race is noteworthy, but to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, he's being judged not by the color of skin, but in indifference to it, and rather to the content of his character.

To top it off, this afternoon on NPR, I heard this story of first-time black voters in St. Louis who are voting for similar pride. At the end of the story, one of the interviewees, Ed Welch, relayed this, which he got as a text message, and I think it both encapsulates the fruition of the Civil Rights Movement and the progress of America as a whole through the African-American experience:

"Rosa sat so Martin could walk.
Martin walked so Obama could run.
Obama is running so our children can fly."