Langston Hughes

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Langston Hughes died on the 22nd of May 1967, and beneath the floor of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, his ashes rest under an African cosmogram titled Rivers. At the center of that design is a single line taken from his most famous poem: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." A poet who spent his whole adult life in Harlem, a columnist who wrote in the same newspaper for twenty years, a man who helped define what Black art could be in America - Hughes left behind a legacy that is still being argued over, still being performed, and still being discovered. How did a child raised largely without his parents in Lawrence, Kansas become the voice of the Harlem Renaissance? What choices, and what costs, shaped that journey?

• 2. Roots and Loneliness

  ›

  Mary Patterson, Hughes's maternal grandmother, was one of the first women to attend Oberlin College - and it was she who raised him through most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. She had lived through extraordinary history. Her first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, joined John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in West Virginia in 1859 and was fatally wounded there. A decade later she married into the Langston family, whose members Charles Henry Langston and his brother John Mercer Langston had helped lead the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1858.

  Hughes's father James Nathaniel Hughes left the family shortly after Langston's birth in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, moving first to Cuba and then to Mexico to escape the racial intolerance he found in the United States. His mother Carrie travelled frequently in search of work. The grandmother who raised Hughes told him stories of Black resistance, dignity, and perseverance - stories that would become the moral foundation of his writing.

  In his autobiography The Big Sea, published in 1940, Hughes recalled the texture of those early years plainly: "I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me." After Mary Patterson Langston died, Hughes went to live with family friends James and Auntie Mary Reed for two years, and later rejoined his mother in Lincoln, Illinois, and then in the Fairfax neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. At Central High School in Cleveland, a teacher named Helen Maria Chesnutt proved inspiring. His first piece of jazz poetry, "When Sue Wears Red," was written while he was still in high school.

• 3. Columbia and the Break

  ›

  Hughes enrolled at Columbia University in September 1921 after a protracted negotiation with his father in Mexico. His father had wanted him to study engineering abroad; Hughes wanted to be a writer and to attend Columbia. They reached a compromise: Hughes would study engineering so long as he could attend Columbia. His father funded the tuition.

  At Columbia, Hughes maintained a B+ grade average. He published poetry in the Columbia Daily Spectator under a pen name. But the campus itself was hostile. He was initially denied a room because he was Black, and even after settling in Hartley Hall he found classmates who seemed hostile to anyone outside a WASP identity. He preferred Broadway productions and lectures at the Rand School to his assigned coursework, and he was drawn far more to the streets and people of Harlem than to his studies. He dropped out in 1922.

  What followed was a period of odd jobs and wandering. In 1923 he served briefly as a crewman aboard the S.S. Malone, spending six months traveling to West Africa and Europe. In Paris he met Anne Marie Coussey, a British-educated African from a well-to-do Gold Coast family; they corresponded afterwards but she eventually married Hugh Wooding, a Trinidadian lawyer who later served as chancellor of the University of the West Indies. By November 1924 Hughes had returned to the United States, eventually settling in Washington, D.C., where in 1925 he worked briefly as a personal assistant to historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Finding the job too demanding on his writing time, he quit to work as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel - where he encountered poet Vachel Lindsay and shared some of his poems. Lindsay publicly announced his discovery of a new Black poet.

• 4. The Harlem Renaissance

  ›

  "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" appeared first in The Crisis in 1921, the year Hughes enrolled at Columbia - and it became his signature poem, eventually collected in his debut poetry collection, The Weary Blues, published in 1926. More of his poems were published in The Crisis than in any other journal; his first and last published poems both appeared there.

  Hughes and his contemporaries in the Harlem Renaissance - Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas - had different aims than the Black middle class. They sought to depict the real lives of working-class Black Americans, and they criticized divisions within the Black community based on skin color. All except McKay also collaborated on the short-lived magazine Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists.

  In 1926 Hughes published what amounted to their artistic statement, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," in The Nation. The essay declared: "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." Hughes put the same conviction into practice in his first novel, Not Without Laughter, published in 1930, which won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature. Its protagonist, a boy named Sandy, and his family navigate race and class alongside their own internal conflicts. Crucially, Hughes was financially supported for two years before the novel was published - at a time before widespread arts grants, he depended on private patrons.

• 5. The Southern Journey

  ›

  In the spring of 1927, Fisk University in Nashville invited Hughes to perform his poems there, and a Young Women's Christian Association convention in Texas extended a second invitation. Hughes accepted both, seeing the trip as an opportunity to travel through the South and document the lives of Black people in the region - a part of the country he had previously written about only from a distance, with a poem called "The South" published in The Crisis in June 1922 that he later considered unfair in its stereotypes.

  The journey was funded by patron Charlotte Osgood Mason. On the 23rd of July 1927, at a passenger terminal in Mobile, Alabama, Hughes met Zora Neale Hurston. Because Hurston owned a car, the two traveled together, documenting folk songs and local customs.

  They visited the Tuskegee Institute, where they met writer Jessie Fauset and posed together in a photograph in front of Booker T. Washington's grave on campus. The university asked Hughes to write a poem as an anthem honoring Washington's memory; that poem, "Alabama Earth," was published in 1928. Continuing through the region, they visited the relatives of Jean Toomer in Georgia and saw the plantation that had inspired his novel Cane from 1923. In Macon, they met Bessie Smith. Hughes also encountered a man called Ed Pinkney, an escaped chain-prisoner, whose story he later recounted in a document known as "Foreword from Life." The notes gathered on this trip fed directly into Not Without Laughter and into the play Mule Bone, which Hughes co-wrote with Hurston. The encounter with Hurston would eventually fracture into a painful dispute over the authorship of that play.

• 6. Politics and McCarthy

  ›

  In 1932, Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union as part of a group of African Americans invited to participate in a proposed Soviet film depicting conditions of Black life in the United States. The film project was later abandoned without explanation to the group. Hughes stayed, traveling through Soviet-controlled regions of Central Asia that were generally inaccessible to Western visitors. In Turkmenistan he met and befriended the Hungarian author Arthur Koestler, then a Communist. He also encountered Robert Robinson, an African American living in Moscow who could not leave the country.

  Back in the United States, Hughes's poetry appeared in the CPUSA newspaper, and he was involved in the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys. In 1937 he traveled to Spain as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and other African-American newspapers, covering the Spanish Civil War on behalf of the Republican faction. In August of that year he broadcast live from Madrid alongside Harry Haywood and Walter Benjamin Garland. A Spanish Republican cultural magazine, El Mono Azul, published Spanish translations of his poems during his time there and, when he departed in November 1937, ran a farewell message calling him "el gran poeta de raza negra" - "the great poet of the black race."

  In 1953 Hughes was called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He told the subcommittee: "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." After his testimony he distanced himself from Communist-aligned causes and, when compiling his Selected Poems in 1959, excluded all the radical socialist verse from the 1930s. Critics on the Left who rebuked him for this were unaware that a secret interrogation had taken place in the days before the televised hearing.

• 7. Legacy and Remembrance

  ›

  Hughes died at the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City on the 22nd of May 1967, from complications following abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer. He was 66. His home in Harlem at 20 East 127th Street gained landmark status in 1981 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982; 127th Street was renamed Langston Hughes Place. The home is now a museum.

  His last poetry collection, The Panther and the Lash, was published posthumously in 1967. It was intended to show solidarity with younger Black writers who supported the Black Power movement, though Hughes had privately believed some of those writers were too consumed by anger. Loften Mitchell, one of the young Black writers Hughes mentored, observed: "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."

  Alice Walker was among those he discovered. His work on the anthology The Poetry of the Negro 1746-1949, co-edited with Arna Bontemps, was described by The New York Times as "a stimulating cross-section of the imaginative writing of the Negro." His Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, written in 1960, received its world premiere in March 2009 at Carnegie Hall, with music specially composed by Laura Karpman, as part of a festival curated by Jessye Norman. On the 22nd of September 2016, his poem "I, Too" was printed on a full page of The New York Times in response to riots in Charlotte, North Carolina - nearly half a century after his death, still being called upon.