The Harlem Branch Y

From Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B,” from the book-length sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). The writer (not “speaker”) has been given an assignment: write a page, “And let that page come out of you — / Then, it will be true.” He wonders if it’s that simple:


Here’s the poem. Imagine being an instructor and getting that page in response to an assignment.

The college is the City College of New York at 160 Convent Avenue. The park is St. Nicholas Park. Eighth Avenue is now Frederick Douglass Boulevard; Seventh, now Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. And here is the Y:

[Harlem Branch YMCA, 180 West 135th Street, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The Y still stands. When I taught this poem, I liked to use Google Maps to follow the poem’s path (though one can’t get across the park by map). And I liked to play samples to give a sense of the writer’s eclectic musical interests: “Bessie, bop, or Bach,” his own three Bs. I didn’t know about the tax photos in the NYC Municipal Archives then.

Here’s some Harlem Branch Y history, with Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Jackie Robinson, Cicely Tyson, and Wesley A. Williams.

*

It occurred to me only today that Hughes‘s poem fits perfectly on one typed page.

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives