Bop by Langston Hughes (190)

Bop written by Langston Hughes is about two kids, one white and one black, listening to a type of music known as Bop (or Be-Bop). The origin of bop comes from the sound that a police club makes when a police officer is beating a negro. The one white boy does not understand bop and calls it nonsense simply out of the fact he doesn't comprehend it. Simple goes on to tell him that he can't understand it because he hasn't suffered much or dealt with dark days so he can't appreciate the art of Bop.

Langston Hughes was an American poet and social activist. Hughes was a black writer and was one of the earliest creators of the then-new art style called jazz poetry. Since Langston Hughes is black like one of the main characters in the essay, he is attempting to send a message about racial segregation at that point in time. Blacks were treated as inferior to whites for many, many years. Simple explains later in the essay that bop is a way of expressing the sounds and emotions a man makes and feels while being beat down, not only by a police officer, but by the world as a whole. That is the attempted message that Hughes is attempting to convey to the reader. That although in this essay it was just literally cops that beat down on Negroes, it is everyone in the whole world that was constantly beating them up.

Hughes intended audience was anyone who was unaware or ignorant to how severe the racial hatred and physical abuse was for African-Americans. Hughes tried to use an analogy through this essay of Bop to parallel what was going on in society at that point in time. I do feel that Langston Hughes did the best job out of all the essays I read at accomplishing his purpose. In this short, very rudimentary essay, Hughes was able to put in his powerful and emotional message about the abusive world that African-Americans live in.

Hughes was trying to use a setting of just two innocent boys listening to music to help demonstrate the awful police brutality against Negroes that took place at that point in time. (Photo found on Pintrest.com)