Langston Hughes poem’s

Classic Poetry Series
Langston Hughes
– poems –
Publication Date:
2012
Publisher:
PoemHunter.Com – The World’s Poetry Archive
www.PoemHunter.com – The World’s Poetry Archive

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Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967)
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 “Harlem was in vogue.”
Biography
Ancestry and Childhood
Both of Hughes’ paternal and maternal great-grandmothers were
African-American, his maternal great-grandfather was white and of Scottish
descent. A paternal great-grandfather was of European Jewish descent.
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.
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. He and his younger brother John Mercer Langston worked for the
abolitionist cause and helped lead the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1858.
Charles Langston later moved to Kansas, where he was active as an educator
and activist for voting and rights for African Americans. Charles and Mary’s
daughter Caroline was the mother of Langston Hughes.
Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school
teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes
(1871–1934). 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.
After the separation of his parents, while his mother travelled 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 the young Langston Hughes a
lasting sense of racial pride. 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. Because of the unstable early
life, his childhood was not an entirely happy one, but it strongly influenced
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the poet he would become. 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 1918; the 2.5-story,
wood-frame house on the city’s east side was sold at a sheriff’s auction in
February 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. “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, Ohio, 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.
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.” 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 neighbourhood
of Harlem than his studies, though he continued writing poetry.
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. 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.
The following year, Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University, a historically black
university in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He joined the Omega Psi Phi
fraternity. Thurgood Marshall, who later became an Associate Justice of the
Supreme Court of the United States, was an alumnus and classmate of
Langston Hughes during his undergraduate studies at Lincoln University.
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
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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. 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. Hughes seldom
responded to requests to teach at colleges. In 1947, Hughes taught at
Atlanta University. Hughes, in 1949, spent three months at University of
Chicago Laboratory Schools as a visiting lecturer. He wrote novels, short
stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, works for children, and, with the
encouragement of his best friend and writer, Arna Bontemps, and patron and
friend, Carl Van Vechten, two autobiographies, 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 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. He found such writers, for instance, James Baldwin, lacking in
such pride, overintellectual in their work, and occasionally vulgar.
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 terse racial chauvinism some showed toward whites. Hughes continued
to have admirers among the larger younger generation of black writers,
whom he often helped 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 in degrees and tones
within their own work. One of these young black writers 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.”
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”.
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 African-American Robert Robinson, living in
Moscow and unable to leave. In Turkmenistan, Hughes met and befriended
the Hungarian polymath Arthur Koestler. Hughes also managed to travel to
China and Japan 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. Hughes was also involved in other
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Communist-led organizations like 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 statement in 1938 supporting Joseph Stalin’s purges
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 existing while blacks
were encouraged to fight against Fascism and the Axis powers. He came to
support the war effort and black American involvement in it after deciding
that blacks would also be contributing to their struggle for civil rights at
home.
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. Following his appearance, he distanced himself from
Communism and was subsequently rebuked by some who had previously
supported him on the Radical Left. Over time, Hughes would distance himself
from his most radical poems. In 1959 his collection of Selected Poems was
published. He excluded his most controversial work from this group of
poems.
Stage and Film Depictions
Hughes’s life has been depicted in many stage and film productions. Hannibal
of the Alps by Michael Dinwiddie and Paper Armor by Eisa Davis are plays by
African-American playwrights which deal with Hughes’s sexuality. In the
1989 film, Looking for Langston, British filmmaker Isaac Julien claimed
Hughes as a black gay icon — Julien thought that Hughes’ sexuality had
historically been ignored or downplayed. In the film Get on the Bus, directed
by Spike Lee, a black gay character, played by Isaiah Washington, invokes
the name of Hughes and punches a homophobic character while
commenting, “This is for James Baldwin and Langston Hughes.” Film
portrayals of Hughes include Gary LeRoi Gray’s role as a teenage Hughes in
the 2003 short subject film Salvation (based on a portion of his
autobiography The Big Sea) and Daniel Sunjata as Hughes in the 2004 film
Brother to Brother. Hughes’ Dream Harlem, a documentary by Jamal Joseph,
examines Hughes’ works and environment.
Literary Archives
The Beinecke Rare Book and 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’ work.
Honors and Awards
1943, Lincoln University awarded Hughes an honorary Litt.D.
1960, the NAACP awarded Hughes the Spingarn Medal for distinguished
achievements by an African American.
1961 National Institute of Arts and Letters.
1963 Howard University awarded Hughes an honorary doctorate.
1973, the first Langston Hughes Medal was awarded by the City College of
New York.
1979, Langston Hughes Middle School was created in Reston, Virginia.
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1981, New York City Landmark status was given to the Harlem home of
Langston Hughes at 20 East 127th Street by the New York City Landmarks
Preservation Commission and 127th St. was renamed Langston Hughes
Place. The Langston Hughes House was listed on the National Register of
Historic Places in 1982.
2002 The United States Postal Service added the image of Langston Hughes
to its Black Heritage series of postage stamps.
2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Langston Hughes on his list of 100
Greatest African Americans.
Eserleri:
Poetry Collections
The Weary Blues, Knopf, 1926
Fine Clothes to the Jew, Knopf, 1927
The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations, 1931
Dear Lovely Death, 1931
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, Knopf, 1932
Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play, Golden Stair Press, N.Y., 1932
Let America Be America Again, 1938
Shakespeare in Harlem, Knopf, 1942
Freedom’s Plow, 1943
Fields of Wonder, Knopf, 1947
One-Way Ticket, 1949
Montage of a Dream Deferred, Holt, 1951
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1958
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, Hill & Wang, 1961
The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times, 1967
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Knopf, 1994
Novels and Short Story Collections
Not Without Laughter. Knopf, 1930
The Ways of White Folks. Knopf, 1934
Simple Speaks His Mind. 1950
Laughing to Keep from Crying, Holt, 1952
Simple Takes a Wife. 1953
Sweet Flypaper of Life, photographs by Roy DeCarava. 1955
Tambourines to Glory 1958
The Best of Simple. 1961
Simple’s Uncle Sam. 1965
Something in Common and Other Stories. Hill & Wang, 1963
Short Stories of Langston Hughes. Hill & Wang, 1996
Non-fiction Books
The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940
Famous American Negroes. 1954
I Wonder as I Wander. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1956
A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, with Milton Meltzer. 1956
Famous Negro Heroes of America. 1958
Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP. 1962
Major Plays by Hughes
Mule Bone, with Zora Neale Hurston. 1931
Mulatto. 1935 (renamed The Barrier, an opera, in 1950)
Troubled Island, with William Grant Still. 1936
Little Ham. 1936
Emperor of Haiti. 1936
Don’t You Want to be Free? 1938
Street Scene, contributed lyrics. 1947
Tambourines to glory. 1956
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Simply Heavenly. 1957
Black Nativity. 1961
Five Plays by Langston Hughes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1963.
Jericho-Jim Crow. 1964
Works for Children
Popo and Fifina, with Arna Bontemps. 1932
The First Book of the Negroes. 1952
The First Book of Jazz. 1954
Marian Anderson: Famous Concert Singer. with Steven C. Tracy 1954
The First Book of Rhythms. 1954
The First Book of the West Indies. 1956
First Book of Africa. 1964
Black Misery. Illustrated by Arouni. 1969, reprinted by Oxford University
Press, 1994

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