Short answers, pulled from the story.
James Mercer Langston Hughes entered the world on the 1st of February 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. His family tree held deep roots of contradiction and struggle involving enslaved Africans and white slave owners.
Langston Hughes grew up in Lawrence, Kansas under the care of his grandmother Mary Patterson who instilled racial pride through oral tradition. He later lived with family friends and resided with his mother Carrie in Lincoln, Illinois before attending Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio.
Racial prejudice among students and teachers drove him away from Columbia by 1922 after he maintained a B+ grade average. He was denied a room on campus because he was black and suffered hostility from classmates outside the WASP category.
During his voyage aboard the S.S. Malone in 1923, Hughes met Ferdinand Smith, a merchant seaman nine years older than himself. Smith influenced the poet to go to sea and they corresponded until Smith died in 1961.
Hughes's first poetry collection The Weary Blues appeared in 1926 following the publication of his signature poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers in June 1921 within The Crisis magazine. This work became central to his early reputation during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
Langston Hughes joined organizations such as John Reed Clubs and League of Struggle for Negro Rights while supporting initiatives like freeing the Scottsboro Boys. He traveled to Spain as correspondent for Baltimore Afro-American in August 1937 and broadcast live from Madrid alongside Harry Haywood and Walter Benjamin Garland.