Langston Hughes's image of Lenin walking around the world, received by Black, brown, and white people alike, captures what the Russian Revolution meant to the colonized and oppressed. When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, they did more than overthrow a tsar. They declared the right of every nation to self-determination and called on the workers of the imperialist countries to unite with the colonized peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Lenin's theses on the national and colonial question, adopted by the Communist International in 1920, placed the liberation of the colonies at the center of world revolution. For millions who had been told their subjugation was natural and permanent, it was a sign that the old order could fall.

That message reached far beyond Russia. Ho Chi Minh wrote that reading Lenin's theses moved him to tears and showed him the road to Vietnam's liberation. Black radicals such as Claude McKay, Harry Haywood, and George Padmore traveled to Moscow, and some studied at schools established to train revolutionaries from the colonized world. Hughes himself journeyed to the Soviet Union in 1932, spending a year traveling as far as Soviet Central Asia. He wrote of a society that claimed to have abolished racial discrimination at a time when lynching and Jim Crow ruled the American South.

In Hughes's poem, Lenin's walk across frontiers and continents becomes the spread of an idea no border can stop: the idea that working and colonized people of every color can unite, take power, and build a new world together. The poem belongs to the revolutionary internationalism of the Black radical tradition. That tradition saw the struggle against racism in the United States as part of a worldwide struggle against capitalism and empire. This print honors that vision of solidarity across every line of race and nation, and the belief that the oppressed of the world share a common cause.

As far as I know, the poem is titled "Lenin" and was first published in the 1940s in the magazine New Masses, but I haven't checked that here. Confirm the title, date, and exact wording against a published collection of Hughes's poems before printing. The poem is still under copyright, held by Hughes's estate.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*