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James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. An early innovator of jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.
Growing up in the Midwest, Hughes became a prolific writer at an early age. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career. He studied at Columbia University in New York City. Although he dropped out, he gained notice from New York publishers, first in The Crisis magazine and then from book publishers, subsequently becoming known in the Harlem creative community. His first poetry collection, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. Hughes eventually graduated from Lincoln University.
In addition to poetry, Hughes wrote plays and published short story collections, novels, and several nonfiction works. From 1942 to 1962, as the civil rights movement gained traction, Hughes wrote an in-depth weekly opinion column in a leading black newspaper, The Chicago Defender.
Ten years later, in 1869, the widow Mary Patterson Leary married again, into the elite, politically active Langston family. Her second husband was Charles Henry Langston, of African-American, Euro-American and Native American ancestry.Richard B. Sheridan, "Charles Henry Langston and the African American Struggle in Kansas", Kansas State History, Winter 1999. Retrieved December 15, 2008.Laurie F. Leach, Langston Hughes: A Biography, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004, pp. 2–4. , He and his younger brother, John Mercer Langston, worked for the abolitionist cause and helped lead the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1858.
After their marriage, Charles Langston moved with his family to Kansas, where he was active as an educator and activist for voting and rights for African Americans. His and Mary's daughter Caroline (known as Carrie) became a schoolteacher and married James Nathaniel Hughes. They had two children; the second was Langston Hughes, born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri (though Hughes himself claims in his autobiography to have been born in 1902). Langston Hughes grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns. His father left the family soon after the boy was born and later divorced Carrie. The senior Hughes traveled to Cuba and then Mexico, seeking to escape the enduring racism in the United States.West, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, 2003, p. 160.
After the separation, Hughes's mother traveled, seeking employment. Langston was raised mainly in Lawrence, Kansas, by his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston. Through the black American oral tradition and drawing from the activist experiences of her generation, Mary Langston instilled in her grandson a lasting sense of racial pride.Hughes recalled his maternal grandmother's stories: "Through my grandmother's stories life always moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, schemed, or fought. But no crying." Rampersad, Arnold, & David Roessel (2002). The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Knopf, p. 620.The poem "Aunt Sues's Stories" (1921) is an oblique tribute to his grandmother and his loving "Auntie" Mary Reed, a close family friend. Rampersad, vol. 1, 1986, p. 43. Imbued by his grandmother with a duty to help his race, Hughes identified with neglected and downtrodden black people all his life, and glorified them in his work.Gwendolyn Brooks (October 12, 1986), "The Darker Brother", The New York Times. He lived most of his childhood in Lawrence. In his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea, he wrote: "I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas."Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II: 1914–1967, I Dream a World, Oxford University Press, p. 11.
After the death of his grandmother, Hughes went to live with family friends, James and Auntie Mary Reed, for two years. Later, Hughes lived again with his mother Carrie in Lincoln, Illinois. She had remarried when he was an adolescent. The family moved to the Fairfax neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended Central High School and was taught by Helen Maria Chesnutt, whom he found inspiring.
His writing experiments began when he was young. While in grammar school in Lincoln, Hughes was elected class poet. He stated that in retrospect he thought it was because of the stereotype about African Americans having rhythm. Langston Hughes Reads His Poetry, with commentary, audiotape from Caedmon Audio
I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everyone knows, except us, that all Negroes have rhythm, so they elected me as class poet.
During high school in Cleveland, Hughes wrote for the school newspaper, edited the yearbook, and began to write his first short stories, poetry, and dramatic plays. His first piece of jazz poetry, "When Sue Wears Red", was written while he was in high school.
While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade average. He published poetry in the Columbia Daily Spectator under a pen name. He left in 1922 because of racial prejudice among students and teachers. He was denied a room on campus because he was black. Eventually he settled in Hartley Hall, but he still suffered from racism among his classmates, who seemed hostile to anyone who did not fit into a WASP category. He was attracted more to the African-American people and neighborhood of Harlem than to his studies, but he continued writing poetry.Rampersad, vol. 1, 1986, p. 56. Harlem was a center of vibrant cultural life.
Hughes worked at various odd jobs before serving a brief tenure as a crewman aboard the S.S. Malone in 1923, spending six months traveling to West Africa and Europe."Poem" or "To F.S." first appeared in The Crisis in May 1925 and was reprinted in The Weary Blues and The Dream Keeper. Hughes never publicly identified "F.S.", but it is conjectured he was Ferdinand Smith, a merchant seaman whom the poet first met in New York in the early 1920s. Nine years older than Hughes, Smith influenced the poet to go to sea. Born in Jamaica in 1893, Smith spent most of his life as a ship steward and political activist at sea—and later in New York as a resident of Harlem. Smith was deported in 1951 to Jamaica for alleged Communist activities and illegal alien status. Hughes corresponded with Smith up until the latter's death in 1961. Berry, p. 347. In Europe, Hughes left the S.S. Malone for a temporary stay in Paris. There he met and had a romance with Anne Marie Coussey, a British-educated African from a well-to-do Gold Coast family; they subsequently corresponded, but she eventually married Hugh Wooding, a promising Trinidadian lawyer.Leach, Langston Hughes: A Biography (2004), pp. xvi, 153.Rampersad, Vol. 1, pp. 86–87, 89–90. Wooding later served as chancellor of the University of the West Indies.
During his time in England in the early 1920s, Hughes became part of the black expatriate community. In November 1924, he returned to the U.S. to live with his mother in Washington, D.C. After assorted odd jobs, he gained white-collar employment in 1925 as a personal assistant to historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. As the work demands limited his time for writing, Hughes quit the position to work as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel. Hughes's earlier work had been published in magazines and was about to be collected into his first book of poetry when he encountered poet Vachel Lindsay, with whom he shared some poems. Impressed, Lindsay publicized his discovery of a new black poet.
The following year, Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University, a historically black university in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He joined the Omega Psi Phi fraternity.In 1926, Amy Spingarn, wife of Joel Elias Spingarn, who was president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), served as patron for Hughes and provided the funds ($300) for him to attend Lincoln University. Rampersad, vol. 1, 1986, pp. 122–123.In November 1927, Charlotte Osgood Mason ("Godmother" as she liked to be called), became Hughes's major patron. Rampersad. vol. 1, 1986, p. 156.
After Hughes earned a B.A. degree from Lincoln University in 1929, he returned to New York. Except for travels to the Soviet Union and parts of the Caribbean, he lived in Harlem as his primary home for the remainder of his life. During the 1930s, he became a resident of Westfield, New Jersey for a time, sponsored by his patron Charlotte Osgood Mason. "Mule Bone: Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Dream Deferred of an African-American Theatre of the Black Word.", African American Review, March 22, 2001. Retrieved March 7, 2008. "In February 1930, Hurston headed north, settling in Westfield, New Jersey. Godmother Mason (Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason, their white protector) had selected Westfield, safely removed from the distractions of New York City, as a suitable place for both Hurston and Hughes to work.""J. L. Hughes Will Depart After Questioning as to Communism", The New York Times, July 25, 1933.
However, Arnold Rampersad, Hughes' primary biographer, concludes that the author was probably asexuality and passive in his sexual relationships rather than homosexual,"His fatalism was well placed. Under such pressure, Hughes's sexual desire, such as it was, became not so much sublimated as vaporized. He governed his sexual desires to an extent rare in a normal adult male; whether his appetite was normal and adult is impossible to say. He understood, however, that Cullen and Locke offered him nothing he wanted, or nothing that promised much for him or his poetry. If certain of his responses to Locke seemed like teasing (a habit Hughes would never quite lose with women, or, perhaps, men) they were not therefore necessarily signs of sexual desire; more likely, they showed the lack of it. Nor should one infer quickly that Hughes was held back by a greater fear of public exposure as a homosexual than his friends had; of the three men, he was the only one ready, indeed eager, to be perceived as disreputable." "Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I, p. 69. despite noting that he exhibited a preference for African-American men in his work and life, finding them "sexually fascinating".Referring to men of African descent, Rampersad writes: "... Hughes found some young men, especially dark-skinned men, appealing and sexually fascinating. (Both in his various artistic representations, in fiction especially, and in his life, he appears to have found young white men of little sexual appeal.) Virile young men of very dark complexion fascinated him." Rampersad, vol. 2, 1988, p. 336.
Hughes and his contemporaries had different goals and aspirations than the black middle class. Hughes and his fellows tried to depict the "low-life" in their art, that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata. They criticized the divisions and prejudices within the black community based on skin color.Hughes "disdained the rigid class and color differences the 'best people' drew between themselves and Afro-Americans of darker complexion, of smaller means and lesser formal education." – Berry, 1983 & 1992, p. 60. Hughes wrote what would be considered their manifesto, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain", published in The Nation in 1926:
The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The Tom-tom drum cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves."The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (June 1926), The Nation.
The first time that Hughes Langston mentioned the Southern U.S in one of his poems was as far back as in June 1922, when, in an issue of "The Crisis", Hughes published a poem called "The South". The poem conveyed how Hughes initially saw the region and its people, describing them as lazy and stupid, thus embracing stereotypes of the time. This perspective was soon to change in a very important and significantly impactful voyage to the South.
In the spring of 1927, he was asked to perform his poems out loud at "Fisk University," a historically black university in Nashville, and at a "YWCA" convention in Texas. He happily accepted the requests as he saw it as an opportunity to travel to the Southern U.S and more specifically to document and learn about the lives of the people of color located in the area. His travel would be financially supported by Charlotte Osgood Mason who wanted him to get info regarding the local folk culture. Osgood Mason and Langston later had a falling out due to Osgood's perspectives on black people, to the point he would later hint in his 1939 poem "Poet to Patron".
He was astonished by the way people of color endured racism and their life conditions in the Southern U.S during his travel. He also had to face racism himself during his visit.
During this travel Langston met, on July 23 1927, in a fortuitous manner, Neale Hurston during a Passenger Terminal in Mobile, Alabama. Due to the fact Neale owned a car, they both decided to travel together and document folk songs and local behaviours of black people in the south.9780393243918 . ISBN 9780393243918
During this trip he visited Tuskegee institute alongside Zora, where they met with writer Jessie Fauset, posing them in a historical photo in front of Booker T. Washington Sr.'s gravewithin the campus. During their stay, Langston was specifically asked by the university to write a poem that would be used as an anthem for the institute and as a way to honour Washington's memory. The requested work would only be published in 1928, and sent to the university under the name of "Alabama Earth".
They met various other important figures, such as: the relatives of Jean Toomer in Georgia (and visited the plantation that inspired his work known as "Cane" 1923). But more importantly, the two met Bessie Smith in Macon. The notes that Langston had gathered during his encounter with Bessie and the ones taken beforehand regarding the local folklore helped him in the making of the novel "Not Without Laughter (1930)" and the play he had wrote alongside Hurston named "Mule Bone". Another notable encounter was with a person that went by the name of Ed Pinkney, who was an escaped chain-prisoner; This encounter would be recounted in a document wrote by Langston known as "Foreword from Life".
This trip also inspired some other of his works, such as "The Book of Negro Folklore" (which he edited with the help of Arna Bontemps), "Montage of Dream Deferred" (where his studies on local folklore came into play).
After passing through South Carolina and crossing the Mason-Dixon line they both returned to the city of New York.
The trip would have a significant impact on Langston, changing his view regarding the south but also made him a more mature and experienced person and even writer.
His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture. "My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind",Rampersad, 1988, vol. 2, p. 418. Hughes is quoted as saying. He confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America's image of itself; a "people's poet" who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality.West, 2003, p. 162.
Hughes stressed a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism devoid of self-hate. His thought united people of African descent and Africa across the globe to encourage pride in their diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. Hughes was one of the few prominent black writers to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists.Rampersad. vol. 2, 1988, p. 297. His African-American race consciousness and cultural nationalism would influence many foreign black writers, including Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. Along with the works of Senghor, Césaire, and other African French and of African descent from the Caribbean, such as René Maran from Martinique and Léon Damas from French Guiana in South America, the works of Hughes helped to inspire the Négritude movement in France. A radical black self-examination was emphasized in the face of European colonialism.Rampersad. vol. 1, 1986, p. 91.Mercer Cook, African-American scholar of French culture wrote: "His (Langston Hughes) work had a lot to do with the famous concept of Négritude, of black soul and feeling, that they were beginning to develop." Rampersad, vol. 1, 1986, p. 343. In addition to his example in social attitudes, Hughes had an important technical influence by his emphasis on folk and jazz rhythms as the basis of his poetry of racial pride.Rampersad. vol. 1, 1986, p. 343.
In 1930, his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature. At a time before widespread arts grants, Hughes gained the support of private patrons and he was supported for two years prior to publishing this novel.Charlotte Mason generously supported Hughes for two years. She supervised his writing his first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930). Her patronage of Hughes ended about the time the novel appeared. Rampersad. "Langston Hughes", in The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, 2001, p. 207. The protagonist of the story is a boy named Sandy, whose family must deal with a variety of struggles due to their race and class, in addition to relating to one another.
In 1931, Hughes helped form the "New York Suitcase Theater" with playwright Paul Peters, artist Jacob Burck, and writer (soon-to-be underground spy) Whittaker Chambers, an acquaintance from Columbia. In 1932, he was part of a board to produce a Soviet film on "Negro Life" with Malcolm Cowley, Floyd Dell, and Chambers.
In 1931, Prentiss Taylor and Langston Hughes created the Golden Stair Press, issuing broadsides and books featuring the artwork of Prentiss Taylor and the texts of Langston Hughes. In 1932 they issued The Scottsboro Limited based on the trial of the Scottsboro Boys.millersvillearchives Golden Stair Press
In 1932, Hughes and Ellen Winter wrote a pageant to Caroline Decker in an attempt to celebrate her work with the striking coal miners of the Harlan County War, but it was never performed. It was judged to be a "long, artificial propaganda vehicle too complicated and too cumbersome to be performed."Anne Loftis (1998), Witnesses to the Struggle, p. 46, University of Nevada Press, .
Maxim Lieber became his literary agent, 1933–1945 and 1949–1950. (Chambers and Lieber worked in the underground together around 1934–1935.)
Hughes's first collection of short stories was published in 1934 with The Ways of White Folks. He finished the book at "Ennesfree" a Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, cottage provided for a year by Noel Sullivan, another patron since 1933. These stories are a series of vignettes revealing the humorous and tragic interactions between whites and blacks. Overall, they are marked by a general pessimism about race relations, as well as a sardonic realism.
He also became an advisory board member to the (then) newly formed San Francisco Workers' School (later the California Labor School). In 1935, Hughes received a Guggenheim Fellowship. The same year that Hughes established his theatre troupe in Los Angeles, he realized an ambition related to films by co-writing the screenplay for Way Down South, co-written with Clarence Muse, African-American Hollywood actor and musician. Hughes believed his failure to gain more work in the lucrative movie trade was due to racial discrimination within the industry.
In 1937 Hughes wrote the long poem, Madrid, his reaction to an assignment to write about black Americans volunteering in the Spanish Civil War. His poem, accompanied by 9 etchings evoking the pathos of the Spanish Civil War by Canadian artist Dalla Husband, was published in 1939 as a hardcover book Madrid 1937, printed by Gonzalo Moré, Paris, intended to be an edition of 50. One example of the book, Madrid 37, signed in pencil and annotated as II Roman has appeared on the rare book market.
In Chicago, Hughes founded The Skyloft Players in 1941, which sought to nurture black playwrights and offer theatre "from the black perspective." Soon thereafter, he was hired to write a column for the Chicago Defender, in which he presented some of his "most powerful and relevant work", giving voice to black people. The column ran for twenty years. Hughes also mentored writer Richard Durham Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio & Freedom – video presentation from the Library of Congress featuring author Sonja D. Williams who would later produce a sequence about Hughes in the radio series Destination Freedom." Shakespeare of Harlem", a presentation from Destination Freedom In 1943, Hughes began publishing stories about a character he called Jesse B. Semple, often referred to and spelled "Simple", the everyday black man in Harlem who offered musings on topical issues of the day. Although Hughes seldom responded to requests to teach at colleges, in 1947 he taught at Atlanta University. In 1949, he spent three months at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools as a visiting lecturer. Between 1942 and 1949, Hughes was a frequent writer and served on the editorial board of Common Ground, a literary magazine focused on cultural pluralism in the United States published by the Common Council for American Unity (CCAU).
He wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, and works for children. With the encouragement of his best friend and writer, Arna Bontemps, and patron and friend, Carl Van Vechten, he wrote two volumes of autobiography, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, as well as translating several works of literature into English. With Bontemps, Hughes co-edited the 1949 anthology The Poetry of the Negro, described by The New York Times as "a stimulating cross-section of the imaginative writing of the Negro" that demonstrates "talent to the point where one questions the necessity (other than for its social evidence) of the specialization of 'Negro' in the title".
In 1949, alongside Anna Bontempts he'd edit the anthology of "The Poetry of the Negro 1746-1949", which was hailed as the "most comprehensive and valuable collection of its kind".
From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Hughes's popularity among the younger generation of black writers varied even as his reputation increased worldwide. With the gradual advance toward racial integration, many black writers considered his writings of black pride and its corresponding subject matter out of date. They considered him a racial chauvinist.Rampersad, 1988, vol. 2, p. 207. He found some new writers, among them James Baldwin, lacking in such pride, over-intellectual in their work, and occasionally vulgar.Langston's misgivings about the new black writing were because of its emphasis on black criminality and frequent use of profanity. – Rampersad, vol. 2, p. 207.Hughes said: "There are millions of blacks who never murder anyone, or rape or get raped or want to rape, who never lust after white bodies, or cringe before white stupidity, or Uncle Tom, or go crazy with race, or off-balance with frustration." – Rampersad, vol. 2, p. 119.Langston eagerly looked to the day when the gifted young writers of his race would go beyond the clamor of civil rights and integration and take a genuine pride in being black ... he found this latter quality starkly absent in even the best of them. – Rampersad, vol. 2, p. 310.
Hughes wanted young black writers to be objective about their race, but not to scorn it or flee it. He understood the main points of the Black Power movement of the 1960s, but believed that some of the younger black writers who supported it were too angry in their work. Hughes's work Panther and the Lash, posthumously published in 1967, was intended to show solidarity with these writers, but with more skill and devoid of the most virulent anger and racial chauvinism some showed toward whites."As for whites in general, Hughes did not like them ... He felt he had been exploited and humiliated by them." – Rampersad, 1988, vol. 2, p. 338.Hughes's advice on how to deal with racists was, Always be polite to them ... be over-polite. Kill them with kindness.' But, he insisted on recognizing that all whites are not racist, and definitely enjoyed the company of those who sought him out in friendship and with respect." – Rampersad, 1988, vol. 2, p. 368. Hughes continued to have admirers among the larger younger generation of black writers. He often helped writers by offering advice and introducing them to other influential persons in the literature and publishing communities. This latter group, including Alice Walker, whom Hughes discovered, looked upon Hughes as a hero and an example to be emulated within their own work. One of these young black writers (Loften Mitchell) observed of Hughes:
In 1932, Hughes became part of a group of black people who went to the Soviet Union to make a film depicting the plight of African Americans in the United States. Hughes was hired to write the English dialogue for the film. The film was never made, but Hughes was given the opportunity to travel extensively through the Soviet Union and to the Soviet-controlled regions in Central Asia, the latter parts usually closed to Westerners. While there, he met Robert Robinson, an African American living in Moscow and unable to leave. In Turkmenistan, Hughes met and befriended the Hungarian author Arthur Koestler, then a Communist who was given permission to travel there.
As later noted in Koestler's autobiography, Hughes, together with some forty other Black Americans, had originally been invited to the Soviet Union to produce a Soviet film on "Negro Life",
Malcolm Cowley, Floyd Dell, and Chambers were also involved in this intended film. but the Soviets dropped the film idea because of their 1933 success in getting the US to recognize the Soviet Union and establish an embassy in Moscow. This entailed a toning down of Soviet propaganda on racial segregation in America. Hughes and his fellow Blacks were not informed of the reasons for the cancellation, but he and Koestler worked it out for themselves.Arthur Koestler, "The Invisible Writing", Ch. 10.
Hughes also managed to travel to China, Japan, and Korea before returning to the States.
Hughes's poetry was frequently published in the CPUSA newspaper and he was involved in initiatives supported by Communist organizations, such as the drive to free the Scottsboro Boys. Partly as a show of support for the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War, in 1937 Hughes traveled to Spain as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and other various African-American newspapers. In August 1937, he broadcast live from Madrid alongside Harry Haywood and Walter Benjamin Garland. When Hughes was in Spain a Spanish Republican cultural magazine, El Mono Azul, featured Spanish translations of his poems. On 29 August 1937, Hughes wrote a poem titled Roar, China! which called for China's resistance to the full-scale invasion which Japan had launched less than two months earlier. Hughes used China as a Metonymy for the "global colour line." According to academic Gao Yunxiang, Hughes's poem was integral to the global circulation of Roar, China! as an artistic theme. In November 1937, Hughes departed Spain for which El Mono Azul published a brief farewell message entitled "el gran poeta de raza negra" ("the great poet of the black race").
Hughes was also involved in other Communist-led organizations such as the John Reed Clubs and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. He was more of a sympathizer than an active participant. He signed a 1938 statement supporting Joseph Stalin's Moscow Trials and joined the American Peace Mobilization in 1940 working to keep the U.S. from participating in World War II.
Hughes initially did not favor black American involvement in the war because of the persistence of discriminatory U.S. Jim Crow laws and racial segregation and disfranchisement throughout the South. He came to support the war effort and black American participation after deciding that war service would aid their struggle for civil rights at home. The scholar Anthony Pinn has noted that Hughes, together with Lorraine Hansberry and Richard Wright, was a humanist "critical of belief in God. They provided a foundation for nontheistic participation in social struggle." Pinn has found that such writers are sometimes ignored in the narrative of American history that chiefly credits the civil rights movement to the work of affiliated Christian people. During World War II, Hughes became a proponent of the Double V campaign; the double Vs referred to victory over Hitler abroad and victory over Jim Crow domestically.
Hughes was accused of being a Communist by many on the political right, but he always denied it. When asked why he never joined the Communist Party, he wrote, "it was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept." In 1953, he was called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He stated, "I never read the theoretical books of socialism or communism or the Democratic or Republican parties for that matter, and so my interest in whatever may be considered political has been non-theoretical, non-sectarian, and largely emotional and born out of my own need to find some way of thinking about this whole problem of myself." Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, Volume 2, Volume 107, Issue 84 of S. prt, Beth Bolling, . Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Publisher: U.S. GPO. Original from the University of Michigan p. 988. Following his testimony, Hughes distanced himself from Communism.Leach, Langston Hughes: A Biography (2004), pp. 118–119. He was rebuked by some on the radical left who had previously supported him. He moved away from overtly political poems and towards more lyric subjects. When selecting his poetry for his Selected Poems (1959) he excluded all his radical socialist verse from the 1930s. These critics on the Left were unaware of the secret interrogation that took place days before the televised hearing.
Harry Burleigh set the poem "Lovely, dark, and lonely one" from the 1932 collection The Dream Keeper and Other Poems
Hughes's life has been portrayed in film and stage productions since the late 20th century. In Looking for Langston (1989), British filmmaker Isaac Julien claimed him as a black gay icon—Julien thought that Hughes's sexuality had historically been ignored or downplayed. Film portrayals of Hughes include Gary LeRoi Gray's role as a teenage Hughes in the short subject film Salvation (2003) (based on a portion of his autobiography The Big Sea), and Daniel Sunjata as Hughes in the Brother to Brother (2004). Hughes' Dream Harlem, a documentary by Jamal Joseph, examines Hughes's works and environment.
Paper Armor (1999) by Eisa Davis and Hannibal of the Alps (2005)Donald V. Calamia, "Review: 'Hannibal of the Alps'". . Pride Source, from Between The Lines, June 9, 2005. by Michael Dinwiddie are plays by African-American playwrights that address Hughes's sexuality. Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus, included a black gay character, played by Isaiah Washington, who invokes the name of Hughes and punches a homophobic character, saying: "This is for James Baldwin and Langston Hughes."
Hughes was also featured prominently in a national campaign sponsored by the Center for Inquiry (CFI) known as African Americans for Humanism.
Hughes's Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, written in 1960, was performed for the first time in March 2009 with specially composed music by Laura Karpman at Carnegie Hall, at the Honor festival curated by Jessye Norman in celebration of the African-American cultural legacy.Jeff Lunden, "'Ask Your Mama': A Music And Poetry Premiere", NPR. Ask Your Mama is the centerpiece of "The Langston Hughes Project", a multimedia concert performance directed by Ron McCurdy, professor of music in the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. "Ronald C. McCurdy, Ph.D." Biography. The European premiere of The Langston Hughes Project, featuring Ice-T and McCurdy, took place at the Barbican Centre, London, on November 21, 2015, as part of the London Jazz Festival mounted by music producers Serious. "Ice-T and Ron McCurdy – the Langston Hughes Project". , Artform press releases. "The Langston Hughes Project, Thursday 24 September 2015" , Serious. Article by Margaret Busby, first published in the Barbican November 2015 Guide.
The novel Harlem Mosaics (2012) by Whit Frazier depicts the friendship between Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and tells the story of how their friendship fell apart during their collaboration on the play Mule Bone.
On September 22, 2016, his poem "I, Too" was printed on a full page of The New York Times in response to the riots of the previous day in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Langston set a tone, a standard of brotherhood and friendship and cooperation, for all of us to follow. You never got from him, 'I am the Negro writer,' but only 'I am a Negro writer.' He never stopped thinking about the rest of us.Rampersad, 1988, vol. 2, p. 409.
Political views
Hughes was drawn to Communism as an alternative to a segregated America. Many of his lesser-known political writings have been collected in two volumes published by the University of Missouri Press and reflect his attraction to Communism. An example is the poem "A New Song".The end of "A New Song" was substantially changed when it was included in A New Song (New York: International Workers Order, 1938).
Death
On May 22, 1967, Hughes died in the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City at the age of 66 from complications after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer. His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the foyer of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. It is the entrance to an auditorium named for him.Whitaker, Charles, "Langston Hughes: 100th birthday celebration of the poet of Black America", Ebony magazine, April 2002. The design on the floor is an African cosmogram entitled Rivers. The title is taken from his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". Within the center of the cosmogram is the line: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers".
Representation in other media
Hughes was featured reciting his poetry on the album Weary Blues (MGM, 1959), with music by Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather, and he also contributed lyrics to Randy Weston's Uhuru Afrika (Roulette, 1960).
(2025). 9780826214980, University of Missouri Press. ISBN 9780826214980 to music in 1935, "Lovely, dark, and lonely one" by Langston Hughes (text), Harry Burleigh (music), lieder.net his last art song. Italian composer Mira Sulpizi set Hughes's text to music in her 1968 song "Lyrics".
Literary archives
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University holds the Langston Hughes papers (1862–1980) and the Langston Hughes collection (1924–1969) containing letters, manuscripts, personal items, photographs, clippings, artworks, and objects that document the life of Hughes. The Langston Hughes Memorial Library on the campus of Lincoln University, as well as at the James Weldon Johnson Collection within the Yale University also hold archives of Hughes's work. The Moorland–Spingarn Research Center at Howard University includes materials acquired from his travels and contacts through the work of Dorothy B. Porter.
Honors and awards
Living
Memorial
Hughes's work continues to have a major readership in contemporary China.
Published works
Poetry collections
Novels and short story collections
Non-fiction books
Major plays
Books for children
As editor
Other writings
See also
Citations
General and cited references
Further reading
External links
Archives
Categories: 1901 Births, 1967 Deaths, 20th-century American Dramatists And Playwrights, 20th-century American Male Writers, 20th-century American Non-fiction Writers, 20th-century American Novelists, 20th-century American Poets, 20th-century American Short Story Writers, 20th-century American Translators, Activists From New York, African-american Activists, African-american Dramatists And Playwrights, African-american Novelists, African-american Poets, African-american Short Story Writers, American Anthologists, American Children's Poets, American Columnists, American Expatriates In France, American Expatriates In The Soviet Union, American Male Dramatists And Playwrights, American Male Non-fiction Writers, American Male Novelists, American Male Poets, Broadway Composers And Lyricists, Columbia School Of Engineering And Applied Science Alumni, Deaths From Prostate Cancer In New York, Esquire People, Harlem Renaissance, Jazz Poetry, Langston Family, Lincoln University Alumni, Members Of The American Academy Of Arts And Letters, Novelists From New York, People From Joplin, Missouri, Writers From Staten Island, People From Westfield, New Jersey, Translators Of Gabriela Mistral, Writers From Missouri, Writers From New York City, Yaddo Alumni
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