He eventually returned to America once again and re-enrolled in college. This time he graduated.
Hughes continued writing poetry throughout college and his travels. During his time in other countries he met a number of poets, historians, and others who helped shape his poetry, and even helped him get it published. He was first published in magazines, and his work was later anthologized into book form. Hughes was considered one of the most influential figures in the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement of the 1920s that saw a surge of African American cultural expression in poetry, art, literature, and more across the urban Northeast and Midwest. Hughes himself described it in less positive terms, sating that it was actually the time during which Harlem was briefly a fad.
In order to understand the context and imagery of "I, Too," it is also necessary to examine another of Hughes' poems, "Cubes." To understand "Cubes," it is also necessary to understand Cubism. Cubism is a modernist form of art pioneered by artists such as Picasso that rejects all the rules and restrictions of formal realistic painting. It attempts to show the subject from every possible point of view at the same time, in a way that transcends time and ordinary three-dimensional space. This is why cubist paintings look the way they do. They are often trying to show the subject from every angle at once, while at the same time remaining realistic in its depiction of the subject.
The opening stanza of Hughes' "Cubes" is "In the days of the broken cubes of Picasso/And in the days of the broken songs of the young men/A little too drunk to sing/And the young women/A little too unsure of love to love/I met on the boulevards of Paris/An African from Senegal," (qtd. in Moglen 4). The first line makes it plain than Hughes is referring to the Cubist movement. He describes these days as in terms of innocence and indolence. It is a slice of life depiction of the upper classes, people who are wealthy and free enough to spend their days drinking, singing, loving, and developing revolutionary new styles of art.