The Negro Speaks of Rivers

[3] Hughes said that the poem was written in about "ten or fifteen minutes" on "the back of an envelope" he had[4]: 620  when he was 17 years old and was crossing the Mississippi River on the way to visit his father in Mexico.

[6] The poet Jessie Redmon Fauset, who was the literary editor of The Crisis, was responsible for the initial acceptance and publication of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers".

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is one of Hughes's earliest poems and is considered to mark the beginning of his career as a poet.

[8] Hughes's poems "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", "Mother to Son", and "Harlem" were described in the Encyclopedia of African-American Writing as "anthems of black America".

[10][15]: 275 [4]: 620 Hughes wrote the poem while the Great Migration, a movement of African Americans out of the Southern United States and into Northern cities like Chicago, was ongoing.

William Hogan, a scholar, places Hughes's poem in the context of this vast uprooting of population, noting that it "recognizes the need for a new kind of rootedness, one that embraced a history of migration and resettlement.

By describing the "muddy bosom" of the river turning "golden in the sunset", Hughes provides a note of hope that Burns equates to the phrase per aspera ad astra (through suffering to the stars).

[3] The scholar W. Jason Miller considers the poem was an anti-lynching work, noting that Hughes lived during an era where he would have been impacted by lynchings, particularly after the Red Summer of 1919, when numerous blacks were attacked and killed by whites.

Miller notes that Hughes was probably intimidated as he traveled by himself to visit his father in Mexico, passing through Texas, where numerous lynchings occurred.

Miller feels that this shows Hughes defining rivers as "part of a natural realm needing to be reclaimed as a site that African Americans have known and should now know.

"[16] In his early writing, including "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", Hughes was inspired by American poet Carl Sandburg.

[8] The poem has been cited as becoming "the voice of the Association [NAACP] itself," along with "Song of the Son" by Jean Toomer and editorials that Du Bois wrote.

[12]: 130 After Hughes died on May 22, 1967,[19] his ashes were interred in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem under a cosmogram that was inspired by "The Negro Speaks of Rivers".