This study examines the artistic nature of three of Langston Hughes’s social protest poems: “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943”, “Harlem” and “I, Too”. Oppression, injustice, hypocrisy and resistance are issues in every human society around the world – from the developed world to the underdeveloped world. For instance, in Africa, the recovery from colonization and the upsurge of neocolonialism have set social protest as a necessity in all institutions. The academia has had its own constant question about the subject of protest, which in the case of Langston Hughes includes putting injustice, oppression, hypocrisy and resistance into conversation. The study considers the linguistic, literary and structural representation of these themes. I found that the pronouns, nouns and verbs are the dominant linguistic representations of these subjects. Whereas the nouns label the characters and places in the text, the pronouns classify these characters in the texts into two groups – the oppressor and the oppressed. These are demonstrated through the use of tropes such as historical allusions, metaphors, similes and others. The verbs set these characters and the setting in the world of the text into action. There are two generic actions throughout all the three poems. These are physical and mental actions. The oppressors enact the majority of physical actions verbs with the oppressed enacting much of the mental verbs and few of the physical action verbs. In addition, the verbs frame the time of occurrences of these actions in the past, present and future time – creating a systemic wheel of oppression, injustice, hypocrisy, and resistance. It is from this period that the themes discussed have current relevance.
Keywords: Form, formalism, Harlem Renaissance, Hughes, social protest poem.