His maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The spirit of revolt did, however, run in the family. So convincingly did he present himself as a reformed communist that, at the conclusion of the final session, McCarthy actually winked at him, or so Hughes liked to relate. The transcripts of those sessions, declassified in 2003, present a battle of wits, as Hughes ducks or deflects or refutes Cohn’s assaults without ever seeming to lose his cool, though his livelihood was on the line. Hughes was not himself prone to explosive behaviour, even when summoned to Washington to account for his radical past by Joe McCarthy, and taunted and grilled by Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, in March 1953.

Biden was referring to Hughes’s long poem of 1951, Montage of a Dream Deferred, which is made up of characters, idioms and vignettes from Harlem life, and posits this central question: It isn’t unusual for American politicians to talk about dreams in their speeches, but they don’t often quote from Langston Hughes, famous for his communist sympathies and irreverent poems (‘Listen Christ,/You did alright in your day, I reckon –/But that day’s gone now’). ‘T oo many dreams have been deferred for too long,’ Joe Biden announced in his acceptance speech of 7 November 2020.

Little nightmares chef paper