Watching from afar, the Harlem poet Langston Hughes offered a prediction. Europe and the United States would take their former possessions back, he wrote. “But when they do, those great cities of the East will never be the same again. The brownskin natives will look at those tall European-style buildings and say, ‘Colored people lived there once!’ And in their minds they will think, ‘We have a right to live there again.’”
