Langston Hughes: the story on HearLore

Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on the 1st of February 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, into a family whose history was written in the blood and soil of the American South. His paternal great-grandmothers were enslaved Africans, while his paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners in Kentucky, creating a lineage of profound contradiction that would haunt and fuel his work. One of these ancestors was Sam Clay, a Scottish-American whiskey distiller from Henry County, said to be a relative of statesman Henry Clay, and the other was Silas Cushenberry, a slave trader from Clark County whom Hughes claimed was Jewish. On his mother's side, the story was equally charged with history; his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson, was of African-American, French, English, and Native American descent. She was one of the first women to attend Oberlin College before marrying Lewis Sheridan Leary, who joined John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 and was fatally wounded. Ten years later, Mary married Charles Henry Langston, an activist who helped lead the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1858. This family tree, thick with the roots of resistance and the scars of slavery, formed the bedrock of Hughes's identity. He grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns, but after his father left the family to escape the enduring racism in the United States, Hughes was raised mainly in Lawrence, Kansas, by his maternal grandmother. Through the black American oral tradition, Mary Langston instilled in her grandson a lasting sense of racial pride, telling him stories where nobody ever cried, but where people worked, schemed, or fought. It was in this environment, living with his grandmother and later with family friends James and Auntie Mary Reed, that Hughes found solace in books, believing in nothing but the wonderful world in books where suffering was expressed in beautiful language rather than the monosyllables of his life in Kansas.

The Sea And The City

The 1920s found Hughes navigating a world that was both exhilarating and hostile, a period defined by his restless movement between the ocean and the city. After graduating from high school in June 1920, he returned to Mexico to live with his father, hoping to convince him to support his plan to attend Columbia University. His father, who had traveled to Cuba and then Mexico to escape racism, hoped Hughes would study engineering, but they compromised, allowing Hughes to attend Columbia if he studied engineering. While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade average and published poetry under a pen name, but he left in 1922 because of racial prejudice among students and teachers who denied him a room on campus. He eventually settled in Hartley Hall, but the hostility of his classmates drove him toward the African-American neighborhood of Harlem. Before finding his footing in New York, Hughes served a brief tenure as a crewman aboard the S.S. Malone in 1923, spending six months traveling to West Africa and Europe. It was during this voyage that he met Ferdinand Smith, a merchant seaman nine years his senior who influenced the poet to go to sea. Smith, born in Jamaica in 1893, was a political activist who later corresponded with Hughes until his death in 1961. In Europe, Hughes left the S.S. Malone for a temporary stay in Paris, where he met and had a romance with Anne Marie Coussey, a British-educated African from a well-to-do Gold Coast family. They corresponded, but she eventually married Hugh Wooding, a promising Trinidadian lawyer who later served as chancellor of the University of the West Indies. Returning to the United States in November 1924, Hughes worked as a personal assistant to historian Carter G. Woodson before quitting to work as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel. It was there, serving tables, that he encountered poet Vachel Lindsay, who publicized his discovery of a new black poet, setting the stage for his first collection, The Weary Blues, published in 1926.

When and where was Langston Hughes born?

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on the 1st of February 1901 in Joplin, Missouri. He was raised mainly in Lawrence, Kansas, by his maternal grandmother after his father left the family.

What was the relationship between Langston Hughes and Charlotte Osgood Mason?

Charlotte Osgood Mason became Langston Hughes's major patron in November 1927 and provided funds for him to attend Lincoln University. The patronage ended about the time his novel Not Without Laughter appeared in 1930 due to clashing perspectives on black people.

When did Langston Hughes meet Zora Neale Hurston?

Langston Hughes met Zora Neale Hurston on the 23rd of July 1927 on a Passenger Terminal in Mobile, Alabama. They traveled together to document folk songs and local behaviors of black people in the south.

Why did Langston Hughes travel to the Soviet Union in 1932?

Langston Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932 as part of a group of black people to make a film depicting the plight of African Americans in the United States. He was hired to write the English dialogue for the film and traveled extensively through the Soviet Union and Central Asia.

When did Langston Hughes die and where are his ashes interred?

Langston Hughes died on the 22nd of May 1967 in the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City. His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the foyer of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

The Southern Journey

In the spring of 1927, Hughes was asked to perform his poems at Fisk University in Nashville and at a Young Women's Christian Association convention in Texas, an opportunity he happily accepted to travel to the Southern United States and document the lives of people of color. It was on the 23rd of July 1927, that he met Zora Neale Hurston on a Passenger Terminal in Mobile, Alabama. Because Zora owned a car, they decided to travel together to document folk songs and local behaviors of black people in the south. During this trip, they visited the Tuskegee Institute, where they met writer Jessie Fauset and posed in a historical photo in front of Booker T. Washington Sr.'s grave. Hughes was specifically asked by the university to write a poem that would be used as an anthem for the institute, a work that would only be published in 1928 under the name Alabama Earth. They met various other important figures, including the relatives of Jean Toomer in Georgia and Bessie Smith in Macon. The notes Langston gathered during his encounter with Bessie and the ones taken beforehand regarding local folklore helped him in the making of the novel Not Without Laughter and the play Mule Bone, which he wrote alongside Hurston. Another notable encounter was with a person that went by the name of Ed Pinkney, an escaped chain-prisoner, whose story was recounted in a document written by Langston known as Foreword from Life. This trip profoundly changed Hughes's view regarding the South, making him a more mature and experienced person and writer. He was astonished by the way people of color endured racism and their life conditions in the Southern United States, and he had to face racism himself during his visit. The journey inspired works such as The Book of Negro Folklore, which he edited with the help of Arna Bontemps, and Montage of Dream Deferred, where his studies on local folklore came into play. After passing through South Carolina and crossing the Mason-Dixon line, they returned to New York, carrying with them the stories and songs of the South that would fuel his future work.

The Red And The Black

Hughes was drawn to Communism as an alternative to a segregated America, and many of his lesser-known political writings reflect his attraction to the ideology. In 1932, he 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. Hughes was hired to write the English dialogue for the film, which was never made, but he was given the opportunity to travel extensively through the Soviet Union and to the Soviet-controlled regions in Central Asia. While there, he met Robert Robinson, an African American living in Moscow and unable to leave, and befriended the Hungarian author Arthur Koestler, then a Communist. 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. In August 1937, he broadcast live from Madrid alongside Harry Haywood and Walter Benjamin Garland. When Hughes was in Spain, a Spanish Republican cultural magazine, El Mono Azul, featured Spanish translations of his poems. On the 29th of August 1937, Hughes wrote a poem titled Roar, China!, which called for China's resistance to the full-scale invasion which Japan had launched less than two months earlier. Hughes used China as a metonym for the global colour line. He was also involved in other Communist-led organizations such as the John Reed Clubs and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. He was more of a sympathizer than an active participant, signing a 1938 statement supporting Joseph Stalin's purges and joining 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, but he came to support the war effort after deciding that war service would aid their struggle for civil rights at home. During World War II, Hughes became a proponent of the Double V campaign, the double Vs referring to victory over Hitler abroad and victory over Jim Crow domestically.

The House Of Simple

In Chicago, Hughes founded The Skyloft Players in 1941, which sought to nurture black playwrights and offer theatre from the black perspective. Soon thereafter, he was hired to write a column for the Chicago Defender, in which he presented some of his most powerful and relevant work, giving voice to black people. The column ran for twenty years, from 1942 to 1962, as the civil rights movement gained traction. 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. Although Hughes seldom responded to requests to teach at colleges, in 1947 he taught at Atlanta University, and in 1949, he spent three months at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools as a visiting lecturer. Between 1942 and 1949, Hughes was a frequent writer and served on the editorial board of Common Ground, a literary magazine focused on cultural pluralism in the United States. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, and works for children. With the encouragement of his best friend and writer, Arna Bontemps, and patron and friend, Carl Van Vechten, he wrote two volumes of autobiography, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, as well as translating several works of literature into English. With Bontemps, Hughes co-edited the 1949 anthology The Poetry of the Negro, described by The New York Times as a stimulating cross-section of the imaginative writing of the Negro. The Simple character became a vehicle for Hughes to explore the complexities of black life, offering a perspective that was both humorous and deeply serious. The column allowed Hughes to engage with the public on a wide range of issues, from the mundane to the political, and to maintain a connection with the everyday experiences of black Americans. The Simple stories were a testament to Hughes's ability to capture the voice of the people, making him a beloved figure in the literary and social landscape of the mid-20th century.

The Shadow And The Light

Some academics and biographers believe that Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, as did Walt Whitman, who Hughes said influenced his poetry. His story Blessed Assurance deals with a father's anger over his son's effeminacy and queerness, and Cafe 3 A.M. was against gay bashing by police. Jean Blackwell Hutson, former chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, said that he was always eluding marriage and that it wasn't until his later years that she became convinced he was homosexual. Additionally, Sandra L. West, author of the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, contends that his homosexual love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover. The biographer Aldrich argues that, in order to retain the respect and support of black churches and organizations and avoid exacerbating his precarious financial situation, Hughes remained closeted. Hughes's primary biographer Arnold Rampersad concludes that the author was probably asexual and passive in his sexual relationships, noting that he governed his sexual desires to an extent rare in a normal adult male. Despite this, Rampersad notes that Hughes exhibited a preference for African-American men in his work and life, finding them sexually fascinating. He found some young men, especially dark-skinned men, appealing and sexually fascinating, while finding young white men of little sexual appeal. The tension between his public persona and his private life was a constant struggle, one that he navigated with a mix of discretion and artistic expression. The poems and stories he wrote often contained coded messages about his desires and relationships, allowing him to explore themes of love and identity without exposing himself to the public scrutiny that could have ended his career. This duality was a defining feature of his life, shaping the way he wrote and the way he lived, and it remains a subject of intense scholarly debate to this day.

The Final River

On the 22nd of May 1967, Hughes died in the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City at the age of 66 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, the entrance to an auditorium named for him. The design on the floor is an African cosmogram entitled Rivers, the title 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's work continues to have a major readership in contemporary China, and his legacy is honored through various institutions and awards. The first Langston Hughes Medal was awarded by the City College of New York in 1978, and Langston Hughes Middle School was created in Reston, Virginia, in 1979. In 1981, New York City Landmark status was given to the Harlem home of Langston Hughes at 20 East 127th Street, and 127th Street was renamed Langston Hughes Place. The Langston Hughes House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. In 2002, the United States Postal Service added the image of Langston Hughes to its Black Heritage series of postage stamps, and scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Langston Hughes on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans. The year 2009 saw the creation of Langston Hughes High School in Fairburn, Georgia, and in 2012, he was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. A Google Doodle commemorated his 113th birthday in 2015, and his poem I, Too was printed on a full page of The New York Times on the 22nd of September 2016 in response to the riots of the previous day in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University holds the Langston Hughes papers and the Langston Hughes collection, containing letters, manuscripts, personal items, photographs, clippings, artworks, and objects that document the life of Hughes. His influence extends far beyond his lifetime, inspiring generations of writers and activists who continue to draw from his work to explore the complexities of race, identity, and the human condition.