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POEM: Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen, Langston Hughes, 1943
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
29 Jan 2025
🖨️ Print Article
Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes’s 1943 poem against fascism is precise, droll, and eternal.

Some things need no introduction, no preface, no preamble, no explanatory note to provide context or history. These things speak to the moment with such clarity, and through such brevity, that to otherwise attempt to frame or explain them would take away from their inherent power. Langston Hughes’s poem “Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen” is such a thing. It is as powerful now as it must have been when first published in 1943, written with the kind of precision and wit that is eternal — and that is quintessential Langston Hughes.

Read “Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen” below.

Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen

Langston Hughes

You delight,
So it would seem,
At making mince-meat of my dream.

If you keep on,
Before you’re through,
I’ll make mince-meat
Out of you.

Langston Hughes, “Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen,” Jim Crow’s Last Stand (New York: Negro Publication Society of America, 1943

Langston Hughes
Fascism

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