“Don’t Turn Back”: Langston Hughes, Barack Obama, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. consistently allotted Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son” a significant place in his public speeches and sermons from 1956 to 1967. Charting no less than thirteen overt references to this poem reveals that it has been overlooked despite the fact that it even appears in King’s dramatic “I Have a Dream” speech delivered on August 28, 1963. In addition to tracing the trajectory of this poem within King’s speeches, this article also documents the political tensions that persuaded King to alter between referencing Hughes’s poem overtly and submerging his words quietly through allusion. These clear and abrupt shifts result in part from false yet potent communist accusations against both Hughes and the civil rights movement. Charting King’s use of this poem provides the means to demonstrate how Langston Hughes’s poetry became a measurable inflection in the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Because of King’s repeated use of this poem, this essay’s conclusion locates and then briefly discusses an inadvertent allusion to “Mother to Son” in Barack Obama’s Presidential nomination acceptance speech delivered at the 2008 Democratic Convention. This speech provides an opportunity to revisit both the continuing effect the House Un-American Activities Committee had on Hughes’s reputation well into the mid-1960s and the rhetorical courage King demonstrated by continuing to embed Hughes’s poems in his speeches.