In Celebration of the Life of Langston Hughes (1/2/02 - 22/5'/67 )

 

Today is not only the first day of Black History Month in the USA, it is also American, writer, poet and social activist Langston Hughes birthday..

Born James Mercer Langston Hughea on Fevruart 1 February 1902, in Joplin Missouri. Hughes eventually became one of America's greatest and most prolific poets  

His parents James Nathaniel Hughes (an attorney) and Caroline Hughes (an actress and school teacher).divorced when he was very young. His father moved to Cuba, and then to Mexico,. while he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston. in Lawrence, Kansas.  

Foreshadowing his career, in elementary school Hughes was selected as the class poet, about which he said, “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.” By high school he was writing for the school newspaper and yearbook, as well as beginning to write poetry and short stories on his own. Hughes attended Columbia University in New York, which he left after a year citing racial prejudice. However, this was his first introduction to Harlem, a primarily African American neighborhood surrounding Columbia, which would become his muse and home. He famously stated, “Harlem was in vogue.” Through his writing he explored issues of racism, injustice, culture and spirituality..

 Hughes was greatly impacted by African culture. He travelled back and forth from America to different parts of Africa for his job working on a boat during his lifetime. His experience with the culture there, combined with the culture he experienced in America, led to the poetry’s powerful nature. When art and culture were in flux, Langston turned from the classical Shakespearean format to the flow of folk stories and blues songs. He worked hard throughout his life to write about meaningful topics and make them accessible to as many people as possible. He made sure to use an easily understood,vocabulary and often recited his poems, giving people who couldn’t read access to his work as well.

While his work was affected by his race, Hughes was careful to keep mentions of his sexuality to a minimum. In his most obvious queer works, he does not align himself with queerness but rather shows his support for the queer community. In ‘Cafe, 3 AM’, for example, Hughes says:

“Degenerates,/some folks say./But God, Nature,/or somebody/made them that way.”

Despite his relative silence on the subject, speculation on his sexuality has always existed. Some theorists claimed that Hughes wasn’t gay but was rather uninterested in sex with anyone, regardless of gender. Others claim that he was a gay man, and any suggestion to the contrary is an attempt to hide an important part of his identity.

There is,  more than enough evidence that Langston experienced deep romantic attraction to other men. He wrote many unpublished love poems with their subjects being men, and he often found himself in the company of gay men, having many friends who were out, and being a part of the queer community at the time.Despite the community of relative support he was surrounded with, Langston Hughes never came out himself.

He would first gain the attention of New York publishers when attending Columbia University between 1921 and 1922. Releasing works in local publications, he soon became a permanent artistic and intellectual fixture of the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Throughout his life Hughes published numerous acclaimed poems, plays, novels, two autobiographies, and helped pioneer the jazz poetry style.

He along with his contemporaries in the Harlem Renaissance, made a point to speak to the lower strata of Black  people, focussing their art on opposing their social conditions, confronting stereotypes ND Re-imagining Black people's image of themselves. His cultural nationalism and racial consciousness was a great influence to many Black writers who followed in his footsteps,

Though the poet permanently settled in New York in 1929 after graduating from Lincoln University, he would still travel internationally as both a writer and reporter. In 1932 Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union, along with 22 African American artists, filmmakers, and actors to produce a film about African American life in southern states. Though the film was cancelled, Hughes remained in the USSR for a short time where he felt unrestricted by discrimination. He traveled on the Moscow-Tashkent express train to Central Asia where he witnessed the ethnic diversity of the USSR’s southern regions. Hughes would later find himself persecuted for his associations with the USSR and his revolutionary poetry

In 1937 he covered the Spanish Civil War as a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American, writing on topics untouched by the white mainstream Western press such as the participation and leadership of African American anti-fascists in the war. During this time, Hughes would cross paths with Spain’s and Cuba’s outstanding Afro-descendant poets Federico Garcia Lorca and Nicolás Guillén. 

He also   he supported the Scottsboro boys, and strongly opposed the McCarthy witchhunts,

 Hughes’ first book of poems was The Weary  Blues , published in 1926. It included “,The Weary  Blues ” seen below in a performance with the Doug Parker Band in 1958. It also included his famous "The Negro Speaks of Rivers (first published in the radical Black newspaper The Crisis in 1921), which he reads in another video below.

 

 

 

 

Some of his other famous works are Let America Be America Again, Sweet Flypaper of Life (with photography by Roy DeCarava), Montage of a Dream Deferred and The Mulatto. 

In addition to poetry, Hughes wrote plays, and short stories. He also published several non-fiction works. From 1942 to 1962, as the civil rights movement was gaining traction, he wrote an in-depth weekly column in a leading black newspaper, The Chicago Defender.

Although Hughes had trouble with both black and white critics, he was the first black American to earn his living solely from his writing and public lectures. Part of the reason he was able to do this was the phenomenal acceptance and love he received from average black people. A reviewer for Black World noted in 1970: "Those whose prerogative it is to determine the rank of writers have never rated him highly, but if the weight of public response is any gauge then Langston Hughes stands at the apex of literary relevance among Black  people. The poet occupies such a position in the memory of his people precisely because he recognized that ‘we possess within ourselves a great reservoir of physical and spiritual strength,’ and because he used his artistry to reflect this back to the people."

On May 22, 1967, Hughes died from complications of prostate cancer. A tribute to his poetry, his funeral was filled with jazz and blues music. His ashes were interred beneath the entrance of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The inscription marking the spot features a line from Langston’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” which states “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

His Harlem home, on East 127th Street, received New York City Landmark status in 1981 and was added to the National Register of Places in 1982. Volumes of his work continue to be published and translated throughout the world.

He passed away on May 22, 1967 and his ashes are interred at the Arthur Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

As a sensitive Pan-Africanist, humanist, and anti-imperialist, Hughes would continue to the end of his life to write on African American and African efforts at cultural, political, economic, and psychological freedom.He bravely  confronted racial stereotypes, and protested social conditions whilst promoting the concepts of equality,freedom and  African American heritage, His work helped shape the future of American literature and even helped change politics. I remember his words, his legacy, his commitment to his art and his people, and his unwavering belief in the value and beauty of all Black lives. 

 

A Dream Deferred-  Langston Hughes

 

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explod:?

 

Freedom- Langston Hughes

 

Freedom will not come

Today, this year

            Nor ever

Through compromise and fear.

 

I have as much right

As the other fellow has

            To stand

On my two feet

And own the land.

 

I tire so of hearing people say,

Let things take their course.

Tomorrow is another day.

I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.

I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

            Freedom

            Is a strong seed

            Planted

            In a great need.

            I live here, too.

            I want my freedom

            Just as you.   

Here's an animated google doodle celebrating his birthday and his poem ' I dream a word.'