Langston Hughes

The Crisis: A Record of The Darker Races

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Four specific rivers

Each river marks a civilization built by Black people: Euphrates (Mesopotamia), Congo (African kingdoms), Nile (Egypt), Mississippi (enslaved labor). He's claiming all of human history.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

Lincoln's 1831 trip

Lincoln saw a slave auction in New Orleans at age 22—supposedly it changed his views on slavery. Hughes links Black presence to this turning point.

went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:

"Ancient, dusky rivers"

**Dusky** means dark, twilight-colored. Hughes reclaims the word—these rivers are literally dark-watered, and they're Black history.

Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The "I" Spans Millennia

Hughes uses first person for events separated by thousands of years. "I bathed in the Euphrates" to "I heard the singing of the Mississippi"—that's 5,000 years collapsed into one speaker. The "I" isn't Langston Hughes the individual; it's the collective soul of Black people across time.

This matters because in 1921 (when he wrote this at age 19), American textbooks barely mentioned African civilizations. The Euphrates cradle of civilization? Black people were there. The pyramids? Black people built them. Hughes is doing historical correction through poetry—asserting that Black history *is* human history, not a footnote to it.

The chronology runs ancient to recent, East to West: Mesopotamia → Africa → Egypt → America. Each river represents deeper involvement: bathing (passive), building (active), raising pyramids (monumental), hearing singing (witness to suffering and resistance). By the Mississippi, he's watching his own people's forced labor and cultural survival.

Why It Appeared in *The Crisis*

The title you see—"The Crisis: A Record of The Darker Races"—isn't Hughes's. *The Crisis* was the NAACP magazine edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, and this poem appeared there in June 1921. The magazine's subtitle was "A Record of the Darker Races," which became attached to the poem.

Hughes actually called it "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." That original title makes the claim explicit: this is a Black voice speaking, and it has authority stretching back to the beginning of civilization. For a magazine fighting for civil rights, this poem was a manifesto—you can't diminish people whose "soul has grown deep like the rivers."

The refrain structure ("I've known rivers" opens and closes, "My soul has grown deep" repeats) works like a spiritual or work song. Hughes wrote it on a train to Mexico, thinking about his father who hated Black Americans for accepting racism. The poem was his answer: our roots go deeper than you know.