James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967)
was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form
jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the
Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue" which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue".
[1]Biography
Ancestry and childhood
Both of Hughes' paternal great-grandmothers were African-American and both of his paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners of Kentucky. One of these men was Sam Clay, a Scottish-American whiskey distiller of Henry County and supposedly a relative of
Henry Clay, and the other was Silas Cushenberry, a Jewish-American slave trader of Clark County.
[2][3] Hughes's maternal grandmother Mary Patterson was of African-American, French, English and Native American descent. One of the first women to attend
Oberlin College, she first married
Lewis Sheridan Leary, also of mixed race.
Lewis Sheridan Leary subsequently joined
John Brown's Raid on
Harper's Ferry in 1859 and died from his wounds.
[3]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, Native American, and Euro-American ancestry.
[4][5] He and his younger brother
John Mercer Langston worked for the
abolitionist cause and helped lead the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society
[6] in 1858. Charles Langston later moved to Kansas, where he was active as an educator and activist for voting and rights for African Americans.
[4] Charles and Mary's daughter Caroline was the mother of Langston Hughes.
[7]Langston Hughes was born in
Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934).
[8] Langston Hughes grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns. Hughes's father left his family and later divorced Carrie, going to
Cuba, and then
Mexico, seeking to escape the enduring racism in the United States.
[9]After the separation of his parents, while his mother traveled seeking employment, young Langston Hughes was raised mainly by his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston, in
Lawrence, Kansas. 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.
[10][11][12] He spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. After the death of his grandmother, he went to live with family friends, James and Mary Reed, for two years. In
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".
[13]Later, Hughes lived again with his mother Carrie in
Lincoln,
Illinois. She had remarried when he was still an adolescent, and eventually they lived in
Cleveland,
Ohio, where he attended high school. The Hughes' home in Cleveland was sold in foreclosure in February 1918; the 2.5-story, wood-frame house on the city's east side was sold at a sheriff's auction for $16,667.
While in
grammar school in Lincoln, Hughes was elected class poet. Hughes stated that in retrospect he thought it was because of the stereotype that African Americans have rhythm.
[14] "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."
[15]
During high school in Cleveland, he 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. It was during this time that he discovered his love of books.
[citation needed]Relationship with father
Hughes had a very poor relationship with his father. He lived with his father in Mexico for a brief period in 1919. Upon graduating from high school in June 1920, Hughes returned to Mexico to live with his father, hoping to convince him to support Langston's plan to attend
Columbia University. Hughes later said that, prior to arriving in Mexico: "I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn't understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much."
[16][17] Initially, his father had hoped for Hughes to attend a university abroad, and to study for a career in engineering. On these grounds, he was willing to provide financial assistance to his son but did not support his desire to be a writer. Eventually, Hughes and his father came to a compromise: Hughes would study engineering, so long as he could attend Columbia. His tuition provided; Hughes left his father after more than a year. While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade average. He left in 1922 because of racial prejudice, and his interests revolved more around the neighborhood of
Harlem than his studies, though he continued writing poetry.
[18]Adulthood
Hughes worked 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.
[19] In Europe, Hughes left the S.S.
Malone for a temporary stay in
Paris.
During his time in England in the early 1920s, Hughes became part of the black expatriate community. In November 1924, Hughes returned to the U. S. to live with his mother in
Washington, D.C. Hughes worked at various odd jobs before gaining a white-collar job in 1925 as a personal assistant to the 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. There he encountered the poet
Vachel Lindsay, with whom he shared some poems. Impressed with the poems, Lindsay publicized his discovery of a new black poet. By this time, Hughes's earlier work had been published in magazines and was about to be collected into his first book of poetry.
Hughes at university in 1928
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, Hughes lived in Harlem as his primary home for the remainder of his life. During the 1930s, Hughes became a resident of
Westfield, New Jersey.
[22][23]Some academics and biographers today believe that Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, similar in manner to
Walt Whitman. Hughes has cited him as an influence on his poetry. Hughes's story "Blessed Assurance" deals with a father's anger over his son's effeminacy and "queerness".
[24][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] The biographer Aldrich argues that, in order to retain the respect and support of black churches and organizations and avoid exacerbating his precarious financial situation, Hughes remained closeted.
[31] 
Hughes's ashes are interred under a cosmogram medallion in the foyer of the Arthur Schomburg Center in Harlem
Arnold Rampersad, the primary biographer of Hughes, determined that Hughes exhibited a preference for other African-American men in his work and life.
[32] However, Rampersad denies Hughes's homosexuality in his biography.
[33] Rampersad concludes that Hughes was probably asexual and passive in his sexual relationships. He did, however show a respect and love for his fellow black man (and woman). Other scholars argue for Hughes's homosexuality: his love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover.
[34] Death
On May 22, 1967, Hughes died from complications after abdominal surgery, related to
prostate cancer, at the age of 65. His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer in the
Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. It is the entrance to an auditorium named for him.
[35] The design on the floor is an African
cosmogram titled
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".
Career
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I danced in the Nile when I was old
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
"
"
from "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1920),
in
The Weary Blues (1926)
[36] First published in
The Crisis in 1921, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", which became Hughes's signature poem, was collected in his first book of poetry
The Weary Blues (1926).
[37] Hughes's first and last published poems appeared in
The Crisis; more of his poems were published in
The Crisis than in any other journal.
[38] Hughes's life and work were enormously influential during the
Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, alongside those of his contemporaries,
Zora Neale Hurston,
Wallace Thurman,
Claude McKay,
Countee Cullen,
Richard Bruce Nugent, and
Aaron Douglas. Except for McKay, they worked together also to create the short-lived magazine
Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists.
Hughes and his contemporaries had different goals and aspirations than the black middle class. They criticized the men known as the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance:
W. E. B. Du Bois,
Jessie Redmon Fauset, and
Alain LeRoy Locke, as being overly accommodating and assimilating eurocentric values and culture to achieve social equality.
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 based on skin color within the black community.
[39] Hughes wrote what would be considered their manifesto, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" published in
The Nation in 1926,
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"
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 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.
"
"
Hughes identified as unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé. He stressed the theme of "black is beautiful" as he explored the black human condition in a variety of depths.
[40] His main concern was the uplift of his people, whose strengths, resiliency, courage, and humor he wanted to record as part of the general American experience.
[17][41]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,"
[42] 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.
[43] The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people
Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.
"
"
"My People" in
Crisis (October 1923)
[44] 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.
[45] His African-American race consciousness and cultural nationalism would influence many foreign black writers, such as
Jacques Roumain,
Nicolás Guillén,
Léopold Sédar Senghor, and
Aimé Césaire. Along with the works of Senghor, Césaire, and other French-speaking writers of
Africa 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.
[46][47] 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.
[48]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.
[49] 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 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."
[52]Maxim Lieber became his literary agent, 1933–1945 and 1949-1950. (Chambers and Lieber worked in the underground together around 1934-1935.
[53])
Hughes' first short story collection.
Hughes' first collection of short stories was published in 1934 with
The Ways of White Folks. He finished the book at a
Carmel, California cottage provided for a year by Noel Sullivan, another patron.
[54][55] 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.
[56]In 1935 Hughes received a
Guggenheim Fellowship. The same year that Hughes established his theater troupe in Los Angeles, he realized an ambition related to films by co-writing the screenplay for
Way Down South.
[57] Hughes believed his failure to gain more work in the lucrative movie trade was due to racial discrimination within the industry.
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.
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.
During the mid−1950s and −1960s, Hughes' popularity among the younger generation of black writers varied even as his reputation increased worldwide. With the gradual advancement 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.
[58] He found some new writers, including
James Baldwin, lacking in such pride, overintellectual in their work, and occasionally vulgar.
[59][60][61]Hughes wanted young black writers to be objective about their race, but not to scorn it or flee it.
[45] 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.
[62][63] 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,
"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."
[64]
Political views
Hughes, like many black writers and artists of his time, was drawn to the promise of
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".
[65]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. 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 sympathizer and given permission to travel there. Hughes also managed to travel to China and Japan before returning to the States.
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.
[68] 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.
[69]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."
[70]Following his testimony, Hughes distanced himself from Communism.
[71] 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.
[71]Representation in other media
The poem "Danse Africaine" as wallpoem in Leiden
Hughes' life has been portrayed in film and stage productions since the late twentieth century. In
Looking for Langston (1989), British filmmaker
Isaac Julien claimed Hughes as a black gay icon — Julien thought that Hughes' 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' works and environment.
Paper Armor (1999) by Eisa Davis and
Hannibal of the Alps (2005) by Michael Dinwiddie are plays by African-American playwrights that address Hughes's sexuality.
Spike Lee's 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."
Literary archives
Honors and awards
Khalid B. Scott, MSW, CADC, MISA I, LCWS, QMHP
