Bop

In the essay, Bop, Langston Hughes uses a discussion about the history of Be-Bop music between two friends to address the serious racial issues of his time which still occur to this day. Hughes makes a strong argument that the music genre Be-Bop can only truly be understood by African American people who have struggled with society’s treatment of them for hundreds of years. Langston Hughes was an African American writer who fought for equal rights while writing about his own experiences in his auto-biographies and fiction books. Hughes was a very respected author who became the first African American to achieve international success. This essay was written in 1949 to make every person throughout the United States aware of the horrible treatment of African American citizens by police officers. Hughes uses an informal tone for his first person narrative. This allows the reader to quickly feel comfortable with the characters as they talk on the stoop. He also uses many rhetorical devices to relate Be-Bop to racial issues. Several of these devices are imagery, onomatopoeia and personification. Hughes uses imagery in his vivid descriptions of potential interactions with police. The reader can easily imagine what is happening. Hughes uses onomatopoeia to represent the music that started when racial issues increased. At the beginning of Hughes’ essay, he allows his audience to hear the music of Be-Bop this then changes to hearing the sounds of the violence that African Americans had to struggle with in his time. Hughes creates more sound in his essay through the personification of the billy club as a speaking creature. I believe that Langston Hughes achieved his purpose of showing the racist treatment of African American people by the police through explaining the history of Be-Bop and relating it to the society in which he lived. Hughes was able to reach his audience by making them visualize and hear his experience.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coleman_Hawkins,_Miles_Davis_(Gottlieb_04001).jpg 

Hughes, Langston. "Bop." The Best American Essays of the Century. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 190-92. Print.