Langston Hughes Landlord

In the poem Ballad of a Landlord by Langston Hughes, the reader is on a journey through the eyes of a black man who is mistreated by his landlord because of his ethnicity. In the poem the tenant goes to the landlord and expresses their worries about their apartment falling apart instead of the landlord helping them he just raises the tenant’s rents. When the tenant decides to try to stick up for himself against the landlord he is the one that is penalized, prosecuted, and thrown in jail for six months. Hughes wrote this poem to show the cruel and unjust punishment African-Americans had to endure using allegories, controlling metaphors, and tone. An allegory is a narration restricted to a single meaning do to the events in the narration, this poem demonstrates allegories due to the undisputed racism as the main point of the poem. In the poem the white landlord is insulted when the black tenant asked for him to fix some of the broken things in his house. At the beginning of the poem it does not seem unreasonable for the tenant to want better living conditions before the landlord attempts to raise his rent and to the reader the
The tone of the poem is anger do to the discrimination and bias from the landlord. Hughes proclaims “What? You gonna get eviction orders?/You gonna cut off my heat?/You gonna take my furniture and/Throw it in the street?” (Lines 13-16). The landlord strips the tenant of everything in his apartment that a person would need to show him that he is less than a human. The tenant does not understand how he is being unreasonable in any way but because he is black it automatically makes the tenant the offender. Hughes only mentions the color of the tenant at the end of the poem to show how this situation would be obviously unfair if the tenant was assumed to be a white