How It Feels To Be Colored Me By Zora Neale Hurston

The Harlem Renaissance era gave many upcoming authors and poets the ability to express themselves. After World War I, The Great Migration of approximately half a million African Americans from the rural south to the bustling and promising north gave way to the formation and beginning of the Harlem Renaissance-New Negro era. Within the next ten years more than 750,000 African Americans would follow which increased the black northern population by a stunning amount. This was the start of black Americans discovering and seeking new futures (Krasner). Many of these African Americans were authors, including Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote the famous work “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” and Langston Hughes who wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and …show more content…
She describes everyone as a different colored bag. Each bag is filled with everyone that make ups up someone’s life. Everyone’s bag is filled with the same hopes and dreams. In Hurston’s story “How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” she makes the reader realize that blacks were just like everybody else. They share emotions like joy and sadness and all of the other emotions in between those. She makes the reader know that blacks, like everyone else in the world, are in fact human. Hughes wrote literature that would show the reader that the black community was very proud of what it had accomplished, and that they contributed to building and shaping America. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is Hughes’s most popular poem. Written in first-person point of view, the poem begins with the words, “I’ve known rivers.” “I” is meant to be read as the mutual voice of black people from ancient times to present day. The narrator speaks of bathing in the Euphrates River, building shelter near the Congo River, building pyramids by the Nile River, and watching the sun set on the Mississippi River. “My soul has grown deep like the rivers,” connects the movement and power of the rivers to the movement and power of black