The social and intellectual climate at Normal showed signs of change as the war in Europe began to affect concerned citizens in the United States. On campus in 1940 the second-year junior-college students presented a program on “Negroes in the Arts.” Up to this time the curriculum and the public programs of A. & M. may have included a work or two by African-American artists, but the meat and potatoes of the “serious” repertoire in the old days was Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Longfellow or Bach, Schubert, and Rossini, masters of the Western European classical tradition. This time the evening program in Bibb Graves Auditorium was dedicated to the theme, “The Negro is a contributor to America.” In the printed program one finds the quotation of a now famous poem by Langston Hughes, poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, a beautiful and complicated work. The poem both praises and criticizes the country he loves, and these black Alabama students, in the midst of the racism and prejudice that surrounded the protective environment of their Alabama A. & M. campus, found the need to proclaim these defiant words in print in their program:

Remarkably, this poem, “I, too, sing America,” was not published until 1945, five years after this evening's presentation at Normal and almost two decades before the Civil Rights Movement became powerful in the late 1950s and 1960s. How the A. & M. students received a copy of the work or what correspondence or interaction they may have had with Hughes is not known, but it seems clear that this moment signaled the birth of a new intellectual climate on campus that seems to have few, if any, noteworthy precedents in the years before. On the cover of the program Wilson wrote in pencil, “Rotten.” Whether this referred to the quality of the evening's performance or was actually his opinion of the ideas presented is difficult to determine.