The 1920's, the age that followed the conclusion of the Great War was a time of great prosperity in America. Around the country, stocks boomed, and the artistic community flourished. Jazz music flooded the speakeasies along with flappers and alcohol, the first movie studios began to emerge in Los Angeles, and in the world of literature, some of America's foremost writers to this day broke into the scene -- names that include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Coined "The Jazz Age" by the former of aforementioned novelists, much of one of the most vibrant eras in the United States would not have been possible, if not for The Harlem Renaissance -- a sub-movement within the Jazz Age that saw the reemergence of African American musicians, activists, and poets. Returning to the arts scene to prove, and reminds those with an American passport and zip code that America was not America until the African American voice and conscience was allowed to join the hysteric chorus that was the 1920s.

Of these writers emerged poet Langston Hughes. Praised by critics and historians as one of the pioneers of jazz poetry, a style adopted by fellow African-American writers such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, Hughes not only established himself as one of the foremost innovators and leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, but perhaps arguably as one of the greatest writers in the Cannon of American Poetry. Capturing his personal longings and yearnings of the African American community to be recognized, and heard the way they expressed with a biblical, but amorous conviction, here five of the most powerful quotes delivered by the poetic virtuoso: