Then along came “the perfect vehicle to explore all this stuff,” he said, “and figure out, ‘What is it that I can do? What can we do to shed light on what this condition is? Why are we like this? Where did this come from?’ I had all these questions.”
So Hughes dove in, thinking “this’ll be three years of my life that I can devote towards exorcising this anger—poetically, artistically, creatively—through Dear Mama.”
To be clear, though, he stressed, he was motivated because he was appalled by the division he was seeing.
“I believe in all of us doing this together,” he said, “and I didn’t like that feeling.”
He was also reminded during the making of the series that “you’re never at the top of the mountain,” that the fight for civil rights, women’s rights, human rights ”is an eternal struggle,” he said. “And I was naïve enough to forget that.”