Poet: Langston Hughes
Date of Birth: 1 February 1902, Missouri, USA
Nationality: American
Date of Death: 22 May 1967, New York, USA

Hughes was a poet, novelist, playwright, and social activist. Born in Missouri he moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career. He is one of the earliest innovators of jazz poetry and is best known as a leader of the Harlem renaissance.

Hughes became a prolific writer from an early age. He graduated from high school in Ohio and began to study at Columbia University in New York City. He dropped out but not before he had been noticed by New York publishers and The Crisis magazine as he became known in the creative community of Harlem. He went on to graduate from Lincoln University. In addition to poetry stories and plays Hughes published several non-fiction works. Between 1942 and 1962, as the civil rights movement was gaining power, Hughes wrote a weekly column in a leading black newspaper, The Chicago Defender.

Hughes had a complex family history. His paternal great-grandmothers were enslaved Africans, and both his paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners in Kentucky. Hughes grew up in a series of Midwestern towns. His father abandoned the family soon after Langston was born and later divorced his mother. His father travelled to Cuba and Mexico to escape the racism in the USA. Hughes’ mother travelled to seek employment after the separation and he was raised in Lawrence, Kansas by his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston. She instilled in her grandson a lasting sense of racial pride through the black American oral traditions and from her generation’s activist experiences.

When his grandmother died, Hughes went to live with family friends, James and Auntie Mary Reed for two years. He, then, lived with his mother Carrie in Illinois. She had remarried when he was an adolescent. The family moved to Ohio where Hughes attended Central High School.

Hughes began experimenting with writing when he was young. He was elected class poet while at grammar school in Lincoln. In retrospect, Hughes thought it was more to do with the stereotyping of African Americans having rhythm than his poetry. During high school, Hughes wrote for the school newspaper, edited the yearbook, and began his first series of short stories, poetry, and dramatic plays. ‘When Sue Wears Red,’ his first piece of jazz poetry was written while he was still in high school.

Hughes seldom saw his father as a child, and they had a poor relationship. However, he lived briefly with his father in Mexico in 1919. He graduated high school in 1920 and returned to live with his father, hoping to convince him to support his plan to study at Columbia University. His father wanted Hughes to study engineering abroad. The pair eventually compromised, that Hughes would study engineering at Columbia University. In 1921, while at Columbia Hughes maintained a B+ grade average. Racial prejudice among students and teachers forced Hughes to leave Columbia in 1922.

Hughes worked in a variety of odd jobs before serving a short tenure as a crewman on the SS Malone in 1923. He spent six months travelling to West Africa and Europe where he left the ship to temporarily stay in Paris.

In the 1920s, during his time in England, Hughes became part of the black expatriate community. He returned to the USA in 1924 and lived in Washington DC with his mother. In 1925 he became a personal assistant to Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History but quit the position to be a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel because it limited his time for writing. Hughes’ early work had been published in magazines and was about to collected into his first book of poetry when he met the poet Vachel Lindsay. Impressed by Hughes’ poetry, Lindsay publicized his discovery of a new black poet. Hughes enrolled at Lincoln University in 1926, a historically black university in Pennsylvania, and joined the Omega Psi Phi fraternity.

Hughes graduated in 1929 and returned to New York. He lived in Harlem for the rest of his life, apart from travels to the Soviet Union and the Caribbean. Sponsored by his patron Charlotte Mason he became a resident of Westfield, New Jersey.

‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ became Hughes’ signature poem through publication in The Crisis in 1921. It was also in his first book of poetry, ‘The Weary Blues’ (1926). The poet’s first and last poems were published in The Crisis, with more of his poetry being published in the magazine than in any other publication. During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Hughes’ life and work were an important influence along with his contemporaries, including Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Aaron Douglas, and Richard Bruce Nugent. They also worked together to produce Fire!!, a magazine devoted to younger Negro artists.

With different goals and aspirations than the black middle class, Hughes and his contemporaries tried to depict the ‘low-life’ in their art, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata. They also criticized the divisions of prejudice within the black community based on skin colour.

Hughes’ fiction and poetry depicted the lives of working-class blacks in America including the struggles, joys, laughter, and music. His pride in the African-American identity and its culture permeates his work. Hughes also confronted racial stereotypes and protested social conditions whilst expanding African-America’s image of itself.

Hughes was one of the few prominent black writers to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists. He stressed racial awareness and cultural nationalism devoid of hate and self-hate. His work united people of African descent and Africa across the globe to encourage pride in their folk culture and aesthetic. Hughes’ influence reached writes such as Jacques Roumain, Léopold Sédar, Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. Along with the works of Senghor, Césaire, and other French-speaking writers of Africa and African descent, the works of Hughes helped to inspire the French Négritude movement. In the face of European colonialism, a radical black self-examination was emphasized. Apart from his example in social attitudes, Hughes was an important technical influence on folk and jazz rhythm as the basis of his racial pride poetry

Hughes won the Hermon Gold Medal for literature in 1930 for his novel “Not Without Laughter.” He gained the support of patrons for two years prior to publishing the novel. The protagonist, a boy named Sandy from a family who faced a variety of struggles due to their race and social class as well as relating to one another.

Hughes helped form the “New York Suitcase Theater” in 1931 with artist Jacob Burck, playwright Paul Peters, and writer Whittaker Chambers. In 1932 Hughes, Chambers, Floyd Dell, and Malcolm Cowley produced the film “Negro Life”.
Hughes and Ellen Winter wrote a pageant to Caroline Decker in 1932 to celebrate her work with striking coal miners of the Harlan County War, but it was never performed as it was judged to be an artificial propaganda vehicle and was too complicated and cumbersome to be performed. Maxim Lieber became Hughes’ agent in 1933 and they worked in the underground together from 1934-35

His first collection of short stories was published in 1934 with “The Ways of White Folks”. Hughes finished the book at Carmel, California in a cottage provided by his patron Noel Sullivan. The stories are a series of vignettes portraying the humorous and tragic interactions between whites and blacks marked by pessimism about race relations and sardonic realism. Hughes also became an advisory board member of the newly formed San Francisco Workers’ School.

Hughes received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935, and in the same year established his theatre troupe in Los Angeles. Hughes co-wrote the screenplay for “Way Down South” but believed his inability to gain work in the lucrative movie industry was due to racial discrimination.

Hughes founded “The Skyloft Players” in 1941 in Chicago, which sought to nurture black playwrights and offer theatre from the black cultural perspective. Shortly after he was hired as a columnist for the Chicago Defender giving a voice to black people. The column ran for twenty years. Hughes began publishing stories about a character, Jesse B. Semple, in 1943, an everyday black guy from Harlem who mused on topical issues of the day.

Hughes wrote short stories, novels, plays, poetry, essays, and works for children. Encouraged by his best friend, Arna Bontemps, and his patron, Carl Van Vechten, Hughes also wrote two volumes of an autobiography “The Big Sea” and “I Wonder and I Wander”. Hughes and Bontemps coedited the 1949 anthology “The Poetry of the Negro” to critical acclaim

Hughes’ popularity varied among the younger generation of black writers during the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, even as his reputation across the world increased. Many black writers considered his writings of black pride and its subject matter out of date.

Hughes wanted the young black writers to be objective about their race, not scorning it or fleeing it. His work “Panther and the Lash”, published posthumously in 1967 was intended to show solidarity with the Black Power movement without the anger and racial aggression some showed towards whites.

Hughes died at age 66 in the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City 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,

Night Funeral in Harlem by Langston Hughes

Night funeral
In Harlem:

Where did they get
Them two fine cars?

Insurance man, he did not pay–
His insurance lapsed the other day–
Yet they got a satin box
for his head to lay.

Night funeral
In Harlem:

Who was it sent
That wreath of flowers?

Them flowers came
from that poor boy’s friends–
They’ll want flowers, too,
When they meet their ends.

Night funeral
in Harlem:

Who preached that
Black boy to his grave?

Old preacher man
Preached that boy away–
Charged Five Dollars
His girl friend had to pay.

Night funeral
In Harlem:

When it was all over
And the lid shut on his head
and the organ had done played
and the last prayers been said
and six pallbearers
Carried him out for dead
And off down Lenox Avenue
That long black hearse done sped,
The street light
At his corner
Shined just like a tear–
That boy that they was mournin’
Was so dear, so dear
To them folks that brought the flowers,
To that girl who paid the preacher man–
It was all their tears that made
That poor boy’s
Funeral grand.

Night funeral
In Harlem