A01=W. Jason Miller
activism
allusion
American Dream
Author_W. Jason Miller
Ballad of the Brown King
Bayard Rustin
Booker T. Washington
Boston University
brotherly love
Carnegie Hall
Category=DSBH
Category=JPVC
chiasmus
Chicago Defender
civil rights
communist
Ebony
Edgar Hoover
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
FBI Jack O'Dell
Harlem Renaissance
Howard Thurman
I have a Dream
Jason Miller
Josiah Holland
Keith Miller
Langston Hughes
Lewis Baldwin
Lorraine Hansberry
Lyndon Johnson
Martin Luther King Jr.
metaphor
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Nigeria
Origins of the Dream
Oxenham
parallelism
poetry
Pulpit
Raisin in the Sun
rhetoric
Richard Lischer
riff
Robert Burns
Rosa Parks
Sister Pollard
Smirnoff Vodka
Stanley Levison
subversive
Wallace Hamilton
Product details
- ISBN 9780813060446
- Weight: 487g
- Dimensions: 157 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 03 Feb 2015
- Publisher: University Press of Florida
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Since Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, some scholars have privately suspected that King’s “dream” was connected to Langston Hughes’s poetry. Drawing on archival materials, including notes, correspondence, and marginalia, W. Jason Miller provides a completely original and compelling argument that Hughes’s influence on King’s rhetoric was, in fact, evident in more than just the one famous speech.
King’s staff had been wiretapped by J. Edgar Hoover and suffered accusations of communist influence, so quoting or naming the leader of the Harlem Renaissance—who had his own reputation as a communist—would only have intensified the threats against the civil rights activist. Thus, the link was purposefully veiled through careful allusions in King’s orations. In Origins of the Dream, Miller lifts that veil and shows how Hughes’s revolutionary poetry became a measurable inflection in King’s voice. He contends that by employing Hughes’s metaphors in his speeches, King negotiated a political climate that sought to silence the poet’s subversive voice. By separating Hughes’s identity from his poems, King helped the nation unconsciously embrace the incendiary ideas behind his poetry.
King’s staff had been wiretapped by J. Edgar Hoover and suffered accusations of communist influence, so quoting or naming the leader of the Harlem Renaissance—who had his own reputation as a communist—would only have intensified the threats against the civil rights activist. Thus, the link was purposefully veiled through careful allusions in King’s orations. In Origins of the Dream, Miller lifts that veil and shows how Hughes’s revolutionary poetry became a measurable inflection in King’s voice. He contends that by employing Hughes’s metaphors in his speeches, King negotiated a political climate that sought to silence the poet’s subversive voice. By separating Hughes’s identity from his poems, King helped the nation unconsciously embrace the incendiary ideas behind his poetry.
W. Jason Miller is associate professor of English at North Carolina State University, USA. He is the author of Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture.
