Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South

First published in W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine The Crisis in 1921, Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” uses the metaphor of a traveling body of water to narrate the trials and traversals of African peoples from the Euphrates and the Congo to the Mississippi. It is a tender and lyrical poem that manages to be both an individual search for racial identity and a fearsome urging for the collective spirit. Hughes died on May 22, 1967, and his ashes were later interred under Houston Conwill's Rivers (1991)—a cosmogram in the foyer of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, with inscribed lines from his 1921 poem. William Arnett, the late collector, curator, and writer from Atlanta, founded the Souls Grown Deep Foundation (SGDF), so named after a line from Hughes’s poem. Arnett’s mission was to document, preserve, and promote the work of leading African American artists from the US South.1