Langston Hughes

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.

Like many African Americans, Hughes was of mixed ancestry. Both of his paternal great-grandmothers were enslaved Africans, and both of his paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners in Kentucky. According to Hughes, one of these men was Sam Clay, a Scottish-American whiskey distiller from Henry County, said to be a relative of statesman Henry Clay. The other putative paternal ancestor whom Hughes named was Silas Cushenberry of Clark County, whom Hughes claimed was Jewish. 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 married Lewis Sheridan Leary, also of mixed-race descent, before her studies. In 1859, Lewis Leary joined John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in West Virginia, where he was fatally wounded.

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. 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 spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, with shorter periods in other Midwestern cities. His parents separated shortly after his birth, largely because his father wanted to escape the racial intolerance of the United States by moving first to Cuba, and later to Mexico. After the separation, Hughes's mother travelled frequently in search of work, and he was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston. Through stories of Black resistance, dignity, and perseverance, Mary shaped his understanding of racial responsibility.

Imbued by his grandmother with a duty to help his race, Hughes identified with neglected and downtrodden black people all his life, and centered their lives honestly in his work. He lived most of his childhood in Lawrence. Hughes later recalled that his childhood was marked by loneliness, writing in The Big Sea (1940): "I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me…"

Hughes had a very poor relationship with his father, whom he seldom saw when a child. He lived briefly with his father in Mexico 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 his 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." His father had hoped Hughes would choose to study at a university abroad and train for a career in engineering. He was willing to provide financial assistance to his son on these grounds, 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 and enrolled at Columbia University in September 1921.

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. Hughes preferred to visit Broadway productions and attend lectures at the Rand School, leading to him dropping out of Columbia in 1922. Additionally, he had suffered 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.

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. 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. 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 was supported financially with his education at Lincoln by Mrs Joel Spingarn, the sister in law of Arthur Spingarn, a close friend and attorney. He joined the Omega Psi Phi fraternity.

First published in 1921 in The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" became Hughes's signature poem and was collected in his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926). 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 at Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, and at a Young Women's Christian Association 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".

Hughes's political writings in the 1930s often engaged with left-wing and Communist-aligned ideas, and several of his lesser-known political works were collected in volumes published by the University of Missouri Press. One example cited by historians is his poem "A New Song", which reflects themes of class struggle and solidarity.

In 1932, Langston Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union as part of a group of African Americans invited to participate in a proposed film depicting the conditions of Black life in the United States. Hughes was hired to work on the English dialogue for the film. The project was later abandoned, though the group was not formally informed of the reasons for its cancellation.

After the film project ended, Hughes remained in the Soviet Union and traveled extensively through several Soviet-controlled regions, including parts of Central Asia that were generally inaccessible to Western visitors. During this time, he met Robert Robinson, an African American living in Moscow who was unable to leave the country. Hughes also encountered European writers and intellectuals during his travels. These experiences contributed to his broader understanding of racial and economic conditions outside the United States. In Turkmenistan, Hughes met and befriended the Hungarian author Arthur Koestler, then a Communist who was given permission to travel there.

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.

On May 22, 1967, at the age of 66, Hughes died at the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City from complications following 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. 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".

Hughes had a close relationship with poet Margaret Danner; he included her work in his anthology "New Negro Poets" and he worked with her later in his career. Following Hughes death Danner published the audio recording of "Poets of Revolution" in 1970.

Hughes's home in Harlem gained landmark status in 1981 and was registered as a historic place in 1982. His home is now a museum to celebrate his impact on the American literature and black culture. It is intended to be an educational and cultural center where artists, scholars and the community can come together.

In South Fulton, Georgia, the Langston Hughes High School was completed in 2009; and opened its doors in August 2009.

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).

Harry Burleigh set the poem "Lovely, dark, and lonely one" from the 1932 collection The Dream Keeper and Other Poems to music in 1935, his last art song. Italian composer Mira Sulpizi set Hughes's text to music in her 1968 song "Lyrics".

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) 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.

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, and at the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale 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.