langston hughes’ miami poem
BAD POEMS: POETRY OF RESISTANCE, DEFIANCE & DISSENT PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH BLACK MIAMI-DADE & MAVEN LEADERSHIP COLLECTIVE
April 11 ,2024
Red Rooster Pool Hall, Overtown
The evening was grounded in the history and reading of a little-known poem Langston Hughes wrote about Black voters in Miami resisting the Ku Klux Klan in 1939. In “The Ballad of Sam Solomon” Hughes celebrates the courage of Sam Solomon, a voting rights organizer and resident of Miami’s Colored Town who registered his neighbors to vote in the race of rampant repression in Jim Crow Miami. These Miami voters would make history in 1939 setting a record for the most amount of Black voters to ever cast ballots in a city primary at that time.
In this subversive poetry cypher, we invited our South Florida community to write and share disruptive poems that resist, that challenge the status quo, that document past or current fights and wins…this was an invitation to speak up, to cuss, to not be polite or nice about it; to say how you really feel.
Presented as part of the O, Miami Poetry Festival, we opened the floor to the audience to continue in the beautiful tradition of poetry as archive and resistance.
Read: Langston Hughes wrote a poem about Black voters in Miami. Why don’t more of us know?
