This special issue, “Montage of a Dream Deferred: Projecting Langston Hughes’s Vision During COVID-19 (In Remembrance of George Floyd),” was inspired by the uprisings that spread like wildfire across the nation and other parts of the world after millions of people watched live footage, videotaped by seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier, that showed former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd right before our eyes, in broad daylight, May 25, 2020. The rapper Lil B captured the moment with the single “I Am George Floyd” released on June 4, 2020. The song engendered a wider sense of collective empathy as legions of youth, many of whom were white, began wearing T-shirts with the phrase emblazoned on the front. The scale, magnitude, and multiethnic composition of the protesters were unprecedented. This was Hughes’s vision made manifest. In his second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (1956), he reflects on his experiences while covering the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American in 1937: “My interests had broadened from Harlem and the American Negro to include an interest in all the colored peoples of the world—in fact, all the people of the world, as I related to them and they to me” (400).As people poured out into the streets, however, another narrative unfolded. Among the innumerable comments in articles and social media about Floyd and other incidents of police violence, including the death of Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old Black woman whom Louisville Police officers fatally shot inside her home during a botched raid, there was a steady stream of references to Hughes’s prescience. On Twitter, then–Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms posted a photo of Floyd and quoted Hughes’s 1925 poem “I, Too,” stating: “I, too, am America.” Other posts referenced a variety of Hughes’s poems, including “Democracy,” “Justice,” “Let America Be America Again,” “Freedom,” “Tired,” and “Who but the Lord,” to name a few. One person even posted Nina Simone’s recording of “The Backlash Blues,” which Hughes wrote in 1966 and asked her to set to music. The result was “Backlash Blues,” which appeared on her album Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967) and became one of Simone’s theme songs that she sang and revised thereafter. But more than any other poem, people highlighted “Harlem,” which Hughes published in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951).Given Hughes’s unofficial but no less genuine role as the people’s poet, not to mention his lifelong dedication to social justice and his international appeal, it seems fitting that readers exemplified his vision and thus the premise of our special issue—that Hughes remains as hip as the fedoras he tilted to the side. Writers from here and abroad, who seemed to have no immediate connection to Black people, politics, and/or cultural affairs, invoked his dream-motif or quoted his opening line: “What happens to a dream deferred?” Hughes scholar Edgar Tidwell is among those who commented during the saga.Tidwell encapsulates the tributes to Hughes, and I’d like to pick up where the people left off. Collectively, their posts and articles affirm Farah Jasmine Griffin’s observation that Hughes represents a “prophetic voice of our collective literary tradition” (44).1 This quality is evident throughout much of Hughes’s work. For instance, in 1961, the year after Barack Obama was born, Hughes published a column titled, “Simple for President,” in which his famous character Simple remarks, “What is this the big shots are saying about us Negroes being cool because there might be a Negro President in the year 2011 in the U.S.A., huh? If I am going to run for President, I want to run now—because by 2011, I would be too cool” (“Conversation”). Simple’s wisecrack about a deferred Black presidency is vintage Hughes. The humor in Simple’s tongue-in-cheek insistence, “I want to run now,” hinges on the history of dream-deferral. Black disfranchisement was so firmly entrenched in American society that the prospect of a Black presidency was inconceivable and therefore outrageously funny. So Simple’s signification was sagacious, and Hughes’s import reflected views that were widespread among Black activists, writers, and musicians during the period. Max Roach’s titular statement in his 1961 album We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite is one of many examples.2We’ll return to Simple later, but I’ve mentioned him here because the passage emblematizes qualities that render Hughes’s voice so diachronically resonant. The question implicit in the people’s references to Hughes’s prescience is: How could he speak to us about the George Floyd saga from another time? Obviously, we can never know exactly why anyone becomes prescient. But the passage from “Simple For President” suggests that Hughes’s uncanniness is related to components of his raison d’être: to foreground contemporaneous social issues that affected working-class Black people, to underline and elucidate basic truths therein, and to write for Black people as his preferred audience (Harper 32). These guiding principles in Hughes’s work reflected his abiding love for and unwavering commitment to Black folk. And this political relationship combined with his consequent compulsion to address racial topics shaped Hughes’s critical vision and artistic philosophy. To put it differently, the poet’s indefatigable efforts to address dream-deferral enhanced his apprehension of racial matters reflected in his art. Thus, the diachronic frequencies in Hughes’s “prophetic voice” are concomitants of a singular intellectualism underwritten by urgent truth-telling about ongoing racial issues and contradictions in American society. Hughes’s uncanniness is a logical outcome, almost an aftereffect, of his constant confrontations with the glaring contradictions connected to dream-deferral, that is, the age-old conflicting interests between everyday Black folk, on the one hand, and racial capitalism, on the other.Grappling with pressing issues over the years, Hughes developed considerable political insight. And since the economic structure that precipitated those problems still exist, his writings express truths that speak to us now. In sum, this is what the people intimated in their shout-outs to Hughes. However, he signifies on multiple frequencies. In Montage of a Dream Deferred and to varying degrees other creative works, Hughes critiques dream-deferral in somewhat bluesified forms. However, he presents his ideas unambiguously in prose. For instance, Hughes outlines the blues ethos in a 1941 essay, but the following passage underscores a salient precept in his approach to writing: “the Blues are today songs, here and now, broke and broken-hearted, when you’re troubled in mind and don’t know what to do and nobody cares” (“Songs” 143–144).The poet’s attention to blues people’s problems “here and now” is the flip side of dream-deferral. For Hughes, disrupting the latter meant dealing with the former, which in turn meant taking risks such as those that landed him before Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953. Hughes’s statement on blues is thus an operative principle in Montage of a Dream Deferred a decade later. Foregrounding “here and now” facilitated his ability to illuminate people’s fears, turmoil, triumphs, and disappointments they expressed in humor, irony, dancing, rhyming, signifying, and singing. In fact, the column in which Jesse B. Semple appears was originally titled “Here to Yonder,” and Simple’s signification exemplifies the urgency in blues ontology. But Hughes’s approach also lent him greater access to nitty-gritty details of the social contradictions at hand. And because the basic economic, and therefore political, contradictions between dreamers and dream-deferral remain essentially intact, Hughes’s essays warrant revisiting at this crucial juncture of US history.Hughes was no stranger to the anger and frustration that led to demonstrations in 2020. Two pieces are especially noteworthy. In 1944, he published an essay about the Harlem riots in 1943. Titled “Down Under in Harlem,” the essay anticipates the politics of misrepresentation that typically arises when Black people challenge white authority. Hughes counters: “The kids and grown-ups are not criminal or low by nature. Poverty, however, and frustration have made some of them too desperate to be decent. Some of them don’t try any more. Slum-shocked, I reckon” (CW 246). Here we see Hughes as a critical thinker, decoding the ideological labor—or perhaps better, sophisticated lying—that media outlets deploy as a component of the dream-deferral process. Similarly, in the cases of Michael Brown Jr., Eric Garner, George Floyd, who were all killed by police officers, news programs circulated questions about or reports of their criminal records (Brown didn’t have a record). Such stereotyping (e.g., thug, photos, criminal history, etc.) is designed to offset the moral impact and undercut the moral premise of factual evidence of officers’ wrongdoing.As if to follow up on the 1944 piece, Hughes directly addressed police violence the year after he wrote Montage of a Dream Deferred, in 1948, in his column “Simple Declares Be-Bop Music Comes from Bop! Bop! Bop! Mop!” (1949) published in The Chicago Defender. When Boyd suggests that bop is senseless, Simple is incredulous:That Hughes conceptualized bop in ontological terms is evident in this often-cited passage. Of course, the music wasn’t about police violence as such. But it was an expression of Black urban youth culture, and as with blues-based music generally, bop expressed sensibilities at variance with bourgeois values. What’s interesting, though, is that Simple’s comments anticipate Hughes’s famous preface to Montage of a Dream Deferred:Herein Hughes hints at tensions boiling beneath the surface that threaten to explode, much like they would in Watts, Detroit, Newark, and other cities in the mid-1960s, and sporadically in the 1980s and 1990s, especially after four police officers were acquitted, in 1992, for Rodney King’s merciless beating captured on videotape; again in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, after a police officer fatally shot Brown and left his dead body in the street for hours; and once again in 2020. In a sense, Hughes interprets bebop, which was mostly wordless, as a sonic index to the community’s interiority. (“Freeze Tag,” the poignant, head-nodding, jazz-funk-hip-hop hybrid song about police brutality by the all-star group Dinner Party, which includes multi-instrumentalist and producer Terrace Martin, pianist Robert Glasper, saxophonist Kamasi Washington, and producer 9th Wonder, is arguably a 2.0 instantiation of Hughes’s preface to Montage and his premise in “Simple on Bop.” Released at the height of the demonstrations on June 25, 2020, the recording features vocalist Phoelix, who sings the story soulfully in a blues-tinged timbre: “they told me if I move they gon’ shoot me dead.”)Still, Hughes’s most luminous insights on the blues of our time—namely, the rise of white supremacy—are most legible in his commentaries on fascism and Jim Crow in the 1930s and 1940s. Deductively reading—or perhaps more accurately, sampling—essays from this period, we can tease out the beginnings of an outline to “read” racialized violence “here and now” in political terms. Hughes scholar R. Baxter Miller’s observation is notable. “What Marxists could not read in history,” writes Miller, “Langston Hughes probably could have” (69). Notwithstanding Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—to name a few—Miller’s point is well taken. Yet the obverse is also true. Applying Hughes’s precept (“here and now”) to his own writings enhances our readings of present-day historicity, including the logic and manifestations of anti-Black hatred that led to Floyd’s murder and a history of related incidents, including mass murders in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, and Buffalo, New York, earlier this year.Alternately referred to as ethno-white nationalism or white supremacy, these agendas are shaped by neo-confederate ideology, and whereas journalists, pundits, and politicians often frame their comments in moral or, in some cases, psychological terms (e.g., crazy, etc.), Hughes properly frames the problem in a political context. Doing so, he exemplifies the diachronic voice and vision that moved people in 2020. For instance, in his 1942 column, “U.S. Likes Nazis and Franco Better Than Its Own Negroes,” Hughes uses the term “confederate democracy” (Defender 35) to characterize a Jim Crow political agenda that anticipates former President Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.” That Hughes created the original source of this slogan to criticize dream-deferral in his poem “Let America Be America Again” (1936) is an irony befitting the blues.But again, Hughes’s vision didn’t develop in a vacuum. He was committed to working-class people locally, nationally and internationally—hence his title “Here to Yonder.” By 1942, he had traveled the globe—Africa, Caribbean, Asia, Europe, Latin America—but chose to live in Harlem where he was a recognized and beloved figure. The poet frequented popular venues such as Sugar Ray’s, a nightclub owned by legendary boxer Sugar Ray Robinson (Gilyard). He was also a regular at the local library. Toni Cade Bambara, the great fiction writer, who was born in 1939 and raised in Harlem, recalls seeing him there as a child, before she learned that he was the acclaimed writer, Langston Hughes:Bambara’s remembrance illustrates Hughes’s strong connection with everyday Black folk. His affection for the people extended beyond theory in the conventional sense of that word. This connection is the principal reason why he was especially attuned to news about fascism during World War II and published columns about the topic in The Chicago Defender.Most of us have learned about far-right systems and atrocities—slavery, the Holocaust, Jim Crow, apartheid—through readings and films. Hughes witnessed and experienced different versions firsthand. He experienced Jim Crow as an impoverished child growing up in Lawrence, Kansas, and later as an adult when traveling through Southern states. He also read poetry to the Scottsboro Nine while they were imprisoned in Alabama in 1931. And when writing about child prostitution when China was controlled by the dictator Chiang Kai-Shek, Hughes remarks, “I am not speaking of what I have read. I am speaking of what I saw myself in China” (Defender 61). Finally, when Hughes visited Japan, in 1933, the police not only searched his bags; they followed him, detained him, questioned him, and ordered him to leave the country as “persona non grata in Japan” (Wonder 271). Consequently, Hughes had the emotional wherewithal to recognize the stakes involved. The poet thematized fascism and compared it to American democracy. He wanted to gauge and indicate the differences, however minute, because he knew full well that an autocracy would be horrendous for the vast majority of Black people.What Hughes infers from his experiences is that specific forms of hegemonic violence are tantamount to indexes that identify or locate Western governments on a political spectrum, ranging from American capitalism at one end and out-and-out fascism at the other end. And judging from his criteria, the ugly reality is that the nation is in a sunken place, to borrow filmmaker Jordan Peele’s metaphor, and we are stumbling, to mix metaphors, down a rocky road toward fascism—with Black people stuck in the back seat. The evidence is a litany of spirits—Trayvon Martin, Latasha Nicole Walton, Michael Brown, India Kager, Tamir Rice, Geraldine Townsend, Marquintan Sandlin, Kisha Michael, Jacob Blake, Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Natasha McKenna, Walter Scott, Daunte Wright, Alteria Woods, Eric Garner, DeCynthia Clements, George Floyd, Amir Locke, Lajuana Phillips, Geraldine Townsend, Jalen Randle, and an endless list of others—calling out from their graves like lingering notes of a blues lament, echoing through time.Hughes’s distinction between fascism and Jim Crow in his essay, “Soldiers from Many Lands United in Spanish Fight,” is useful starting point to consider our proximity to autocracy. Written during the Spanish Civil War for the Baltimore Afro-American, which hired Hughes as a correspondent, just two years before Billie Holiday’s lament in “Strange Fruit,” in 1939, Hughes’s essay focuses mainly on the makeup and motivations of soldiers fighting for and against General Francisco Franco. The poet is noticeably dismayed by Moors who sided with Republicans, a theme he repeats in I Wonder as I Wander. (Similarly, notable Black public figures, including as Kanye West, supported Trump in 2016.) However, in one section Hughes compares Jim Crow and fascism, and his correlation speaks to current attempts to nationalize neo-confederate ideology: “Give [General Francisco] Franco a hood,” writes Hughes, “and he would be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a kleagle. Fascism is what the Ku Klux Klan will be when it combines with the Liberty League [a coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans opposed to the New Deal] and starts using machine guns and airplanes instead of a few yards of rope. Fascism is oppression, terror, and brutality on a big scale” (CW 181).According to Hughes, a major distinction between Jim Crow and fascism in the 1930s was their comparatively different sources and forms of violence. The latter tended to use state violence (“machine guns and airplanes”) whereas the former relied more on vigilantes’ state-sanctioned violence (“[lynching with] a few yards of rope”) executed with governmental officials’ tacit approval. The distinction was one of degrees: “Fascism is . . . brutality on a big scale.”3 Of course, migratory patterns during World War II led to large enclaves of Black people in Northern cities, which reduced the likelihood of white citizens visiting violence on Black folk for fear of retaliation. Consequently, racialized violence against Black people has become virtually synonymous with police officers. (The murder of Ahmaud Arbery, in 2020, by three white men, including a father and son, suggests an effort to return to historical scenarios of white supremacy.)But the larger point for Hughes is that there are deeper levels of depravity than the extant form of capitalism. That said, Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad posits a somewhat a different view. According to Rampersad, the only “difference between” the US and Germany that Hughes recognized was “the American principle of freedom of speech in contrast to Nazi intolerance” (370). Rampersad’s point is well taken given the newest version of the “Red Scare.” Juan J. Rodriguez Barrera makes a similar point in his discussion of “Soldiers.” He reads the term “kleagle” as Hughes’s “warning that official political formations in the USA could potentially develop into influential Fascist organizations or parties” (192). Hughes’s subsequent use of the term “kleagle” exemplifies Barrera’s reading.In any case, Hughes repeated the basic thrust of his argument in “Soldiers,” in 1943, when he created his “Here to Yonder” column in The Chicago Defender. Here again, Hughes’s “prophetic voice” is a concomitant of his cultural politics. Both his creation of Simple and the conversational format in which he appears—in other words, Hughes’s innovation—were tailor-made for Black readers. Hughes scholar Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper explains: “In a recorded interview, Hughes stated that he invented [Simple] in order to present the opposite view of the pessimism blacks expressed regarding the war. He wanted to convey that Hitlerism was worse than Jim Crow” (68). Thus Hughes wrote the following passage: ‘“Then I will fight the fascists,’ said my Simple Minded Friend. ‘I will even get up early to fight for the right to stay up late. Damned if I won’t!’” (“Conversation” 14). Of course, this is not to gloss over Simple’s backwardness on gender politics. Nor am I ignoring criticisms, from Black writers with such contrasting viewpoints as Abigail McGrath’s and Amiri Baraka’s, that Simple’s name is indicative of his limitations. On the contrary, my point here is that Hughes was cleareyed on this question; and because he was, it may be wise to revisit his essays, especially since a similar pessimism seems to prevail today.Most important, though, the Floyd saga suggests that boundaries between these systems have been blurred. Chauvin’s public torture of Floyd, notwithstanding his subsequent conviction, was at once an act of state violence and a modern-day lynching. The stage was set in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. When Black youth took to the streets to protest Brown’s death, the police department deployed military-grade equipment, including armored vehicles. In this light, Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to suppress a peaceful protest of Floyd’s murder at Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, using horses, shields, batons, and various munitions, suggests a gravitation toward autocracy—at least by Hughes’s 1937 criteria. Meanwhile, saboteurs’ undermining of the demonstrations by destroying property and creating confusion helped to unravel the demonstrators’ coalition and to weaken their resolve. (Activists and academics have yet to effectuate adjustments to this and other twenty-first century strategies.) So regardless of the terminology, the neo-confederate agenda includes several objectives: (1) dismantle the coalition that led to Barack Obama’s two-term presidency; (2) utilize legal and paralegal measures to preempt its reemergence or the emergence of similar coalitions; (3) utilize voter suppression and/or voter nullification to ensure or secure political control; (4) deny women their reproductive rights and thereby constrict their economic potential and curtail their political power.Race is the gift that keeps on giving to racial capitalism. This explains the apparent illogic of the idiocy, images, caricatures, and outright lies that characterize white supremacy. Even worse, the presumptions, mindsets, attitudes, and rhetorical strategies associated with neo-confederate ideology are kissing cousins with white terrorism. The militaristic intransigence and downright cruelty associated with Trumpism is a backlash triggered by Barack Obama’s success, which evokes Hughes’s description of racial hostility to the Civil Rights movement in “The Backlash Blues”: “All you got to offer / Is a white backlash” (lines 17–18). These sentiments led to Richard Nixon’s Presidency and thus the first far-right attempt to steal an election, prefiguring Trump’s. So the poem is also applicable to racial animus toward Obama whose presidency shook the Republican Party to its core. His transposition of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, which Black Panther leader Fred Hampton originally conceived in 1969, into a winning political coalition that resulted in his two-term presidency symbolized the vision of Black southern activists in the Civil Rights Movement—which is to say, Hughes’s vision of dissipating dream-deferral: an all-inclusive, omni-democratic United States.4And though Obama epitomized political moderation, his confidence, appearance, style, flair, and image of coolness—he could even sing a line of soul—threatened white America ontologically. At the same time, his coalition posed the ultimate threat to the GOP. Trump’s achievement was to use white grievance to sow discord among white voters and to thereby unravel the Obama coalition. In retrospect, an early sign of neo-fascism’s nascent stage, using Hughes’s yardstick, was George Zimmerman’s racist killing of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, particularly in light of his acquittal. As I stated in 2012, “[N]eo-confederates are gambling on the prospect that . . . whites will be [vociferous] in venting their frustrations against blacks, who will be compelled to respond with rallies, marches, and calls for equal treatment under the law, thereby escalating racial tensions which neo-confederates can spin as validations for even more repressive economic and political measures” (Bolden). For their part, twitterstorians protested Martin’s death by invoking several of Hughes’s poems, including “Kids Who Die” (Miller 137), especially after Zimmerman’s acquittal in 2013.Hughes’s essay “Nazi and Dixie Nordics” (1945) bookends our discussion. Published in The Chicago Defender March 10, 1945, almost two months before the end of the war in Europe, the essay elaborates on earlier themes and posits anti-Blackness as a common thread in the ontology of whiteness—which is to say, Herrenvolk psychology—nationally and internationally. Hughes characterizes white nationalism in South Africa as “Jim Crow South Africa,” for instance, anticipating a current viewpoint that the right-wing trend in the United States analogizes apartheid. More fundamentally, though, Hughes anticipates Trumpism; and in the process, he offers a disturbing benchmark to assess the political significance of ethno-white nationalism in the post-Obama era.Hughes argues that the mythology of a master race in Germany and white supremacy in the American South were two sides of the same ideological coin. Several accounts of Germans sound like descriptions of some Trump supporters. When Hughes quotes an American educator to establish his premise, for instance, we find an aversion to truth: “Nazi ideologies are too deeply engrained to change them with books” (Defender 78). Likewise, he quotes a soldier’s report: “They are certainly fanatics” (Defender 78). Not surprisingly, Hughes correlates these descriptions with white Southerners: “To a Negro, they might just as well have been speaking of white Southerners in Dixie” (Defender 79). Of course, Hughes is mediating this information, but the larger point is that his argument is equally pertinent to white supremacists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when he writes: “They do not believe in democracy. They do not believe in law” (Defender 79).Hughes’s statement recalls Rampersad’s statement that Hughes regarded “the American principle of freedom of speech” as the thin line separating America from Nazi Germany. The spread and codification of the present-day analogue to “confederate democracy” threaten to destroy whatever freedoms we have because “Klansmen and Storm Troopers are brothers under the skin” (Defender 80). The machinations and severities of evil perpetrated by a government have no parallel in human society—this is what protesters signified the summer of 2020. Despite their different backgrounds and self-identifications, the people who turned to Hughes instantiated his principle of confronting evil “here and now.” And yet the implications of his writings are grim: white supremacists represent American versions of fascism. Hughes’s warning, “We had better consider that problem now” (Defender 80), resonates like Dinner Party’s funk in “Freeze Tag.” This bitter reality, the blues of our time, invokes new coalitions and new ways of thinking.