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(James) Langston Hughes began writing in high school, and even at this early age developing the voice that made him famous. Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri on February 1, 1902, but lived with his Grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. Hughes grandmother Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston was prominent in the African American community in Lawrence. Hughes’s grandmother was unable to give Hughes the attention he needed, so he began to feel hurt by both his mother and father, and was unable to understand why he was not allowed to live with either of them. These feelings of rejection caused him to grow up very insecure and unsure of himself. When Langston Hughes’s was thirteen, his grandmother died and he moved with his mother and step-father in to Lincoln, Illinois. According to Hughes, he wrote his first verse and was named class poet of his eighth grade class. When his step-father found work in Cleveland, Ohio the rest of the family followed. Soon his step-father and mother moved on, but Hughes stayed in Cleveland in order to finish high school. His writing talent was recognized by his high school teachers and classmates; Hughes’s first verse was published in the Central High Monthly, a sophisticated school magazine regularly (http://www.asalh.org/bhb.html). Typically, a young man of mixed race is caught disastrously between the black and the white world, but especially between longing for acknowledgment by his biracial father and being disowned by him (Rampersad, Arnold, pg2). Langston Hughes died of prostate cancer on May 22, 1967 (http://www.redhotjazz.com/hughes.html). Langston Hughes was a poet that was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance period.
In some respects he grew up a motherless and fatherless child, who never forgot the hurts of his childhood. In his life, as well as in his art, Langston Hughes laughed so often that the tragedy of his earliest years, which is the way he remembered them, was finally almost always hidden. Although many people relaxed before his boyish glamour, a perceptive few also glimpsed an original unhappiness behind his chronic chuckle and ready, remarkable laugh, or intuited in his many sentimental gestures, especially to the young the memory of early pain. Far from being spoiled with love and care, Hughes grew up with a wrenching sense of having been a passed-around child who craved affection but received it only in episodes. This unappeased hunger left him- in spite of his gift of laughter- a divided man. Hughes was caught in the cross fires of being black and white, especially because he was not acknowledged by his biracial father (Rampersad, Arnold, pg2). Hughes had taken up this theme so often that he was unconsciously drawn to it. In his autobiography “The Big Sea” Hughes smiled and smiled and gave only hints of his ambivalence toward his mother. “My grandmother raised me until I was twelve years old,” he wrote, “Sometimes I was with my mother not often.” From the start Langston saw little of his mother, but much of the road-on which he would spend a great part of the rest of his life (Rampersad, Arnold, pg3). Not long after, he left his grandmother in Lawrence; Hughes began a precocious discovery of loneliness (Rampersad, Arnold, pg 4).From the start Hughes saw little of his mother but much of the road on which he would spend a great part of the rest of his life. In mid-July he and Carrie Hughes, his mother, were in Buffalo, but he had begun to plan a move to Cuba, then a “protectorate” of the United States. By July, him and Carrie was pregnant again and probably unable or unwilling to travel overseas (Rampersad, Arnold, pg 10-11). At least once, by his own admission, he ran away from home, because he found life with his mother to be unpleasant. His mother’s failure to reconcile with Jim Hughes, his step-father, had left her bitter. Jim Hughes sent Langston money on several occasions, but it was barely enough for him to live on (Rampersad, Arnold, 12).
There were happier times. Even as a child, Langston was his mother’s son in his passion for the theater and the road. They took the train together to Kansas City to visit Dessalines Langston, who ran a barbershop on Charlotte Street in the city. Langston never forgot his first visit the rattle of the train wheels, the bellow of the brakemen, the clanging bells at the bustling station, and at the end of the journey wonderful food at his “uncle” Des’s and, at last, the music hall, where Hughes’s own lifelong love of the theater was born. In Topeka, Kansas his mother took him regularly to the public library, a small but impressive ivy-covered stone building on the grounds of the state capital, he was entranced by the bright silence of the reading room, the big chairs, the long smooth tables, the attentive librarians who fetched books at his command. He learned to read and write his first surviving letter concern’s a book. His most memorable early encounter with segregation came in the late summer of 1908 when he was ready to start school. When the principal, Elis Foster, refused to admit him, she appealed directly to the school board, argued her case, and won (Rampersad, Arnold, pg 12). In mid-April, 1909 before the end of first school year, his mother withdrew Langston from Harrison and returned him to Lawrence and his grandmother. His mother himself was off to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where on a visit that summer the boy saw unforgettable mountains.
At the end of the summer, however, he was back with his grandmother in Lawrence. By this time, his grandmother had taken him to Topeka to hear a speech by the greatest colored man in the world Booker T. Washington. On another trip, his grandmother and he went to Osawatomie, Kansas on August 31, 1910 for the dedication of the John Brown Memorial Battlefield. With the spirit of John Brown at hand, former President Theodore Roosevelt delivered his almost radical celebrated “New Nationalism primary of humanity over property rights, and called for a powerful central government (Rampersad, Arnold, pg 13). His grandmother stayed home and forbade him to go out afterschool, because of her hatred of segregation. Since blacks were not allowed to attend the church of their choice, they did not attend church at all.
When Hughes entered the second grade of the Pinckney school in the late summer of 1909, he joined the other black children of the first three grades in one classroom supervised by a black school teacher. By the middle of the school year Hughes often cried for his mother to come and take him to Kansas City, where she nom lived. When she could, Carrie Hughes came to Lawrence to fetch him, or meet him at the train station in the colored bottoms section of the city. Together they saw plays, not all of them for children: Under Two Flags, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and Buster Brown. They attended the opened afforded his ticket, Langston howled in disappointment; the theater was in his blood. (Rampersad, Arnold, pg 14)
Feeling his mother absence as rejection, Langston dropper deeper and deeper into fantasy. From his grandmother, too, came little warmth; he had out her tales of heroism. Accustomed to measuring her words, she now hoarded them; he would remember her, finally, as kind but: old, old. As Langston Hughes got older the university building at the top of the hill he discovered the morgue of the medical school. Admitted by mischievous students, he stared in fascination as they lightheartedly cup up and cavers. He returned again and again to watch them. (Rampersad, Arnold, pg 14)
All his life Hughes would be fascinated by death “Dear Lovely Death,” as he called one of his collections of verse, “that takes all things under wing”. Hughes would also so richly assert the joy and the social purposes of life that most of his reader s seldom notices. Once Langston mother came from Kansas City for a Sunday school concert, no prompting could make Langston start his memorized speech. He went further when Carrie presented a program of dramatics at St. Luke’s Church. As “The Mother of the Grace; “, Carrie wrapped “togas” around her son and another boy who were supposed to stand pitifully on stage while Cornelia, celebrated for her devotion to her sons, lamented their fate. Whether or not he saw Carrie’s choice of roles as ironic, he ruined his mother’s show. (Rampersad, Arnold, pg 15)
Hughes life with his grandmother was not much more pleasant. Mary Langston’s situation had become desperate. Langston never forgot his humiliation when another boy, passing the summer with in Lawrence, wrote home pleading to return because Mary Langston served mostly dandelion green. Mary Langston’s economizing led, however, to a friendship that would be of great important to the man that Langston would become to know. In 1909, 1913, and 1914, according to city directories, Mary Langston lived not at her home but at 731 New York Street in Lawrence, Kansas. About the age of twelve, he found he found his first job; he gathered maple seed and sold it most likely to the Barthelme’s seed company on Massachusetts Street. Then he started to deliver the Saturday Evening Post and a weekly new paper, almost certainly the Lawrence Democrat,(unlike the Daily Journal). (Rampersad, Arnold, pg 17)
Meanwhile, he had established himself as a student. Leaving the segregated classes at Pinckney, he entered the integrated New York school (on New York). In at least one monthly report, his fifth grade teacher marked him “excellent” in each of his eleven subjects. Entering the seventh grade at the Central School in 1914, Langston passed into the care of a white teacher who decided to institute segregated seating in her class. She either compelled or induced all the black children to move to a separate row. (Rampersad, Arnold, pg 17)
Hughes worked various odd jobs, before serving a brief tenure as a crewman aboard the SS. Malone in 1923, spending six months traveling to West Africa and Europe. In Europe, Hughes left the SS. 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 again found work doing various odd jobs before gaining white-collar employment in 1925.hughes got in employment in 1925 as a personal assistant to the historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the study of Africa American life and history. Not satisfied with the demands of the work and its time constraints that limited his writing. (Desantis, Christopher C., pg 40)
Hughes quit to wok as a busboy in a hotel. It was while working as a busboy that Hughes would encounter the poet Rachel Lindsay. Impressed with the poems Hughes showed him, Lindsay publicized his discovery of a new black poet. By this time, Hughes’ earlier work had already 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 Country, Pennsylvania. There he become a member of the black Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, a black Fraternal Organization founded at Howard University in Washington D.C. 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. Hughes earned a B.A. Degree from Lincoln University in 1929. He then moved to New York. Except from travels to areas that included parts of the Caribbean, Hughes lived in Harlem as his primary home for the remainder of his life. (Desantis, Christopher C., pg 41, 42, and 43)
Hughes First published in the Crisis in 1921, the verse that would become Hughes signature poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, appeared in his first book of poetry, “The Weary Blues” in 1926. Hughes’ life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s alongside those of his contemporaries, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas, who collectively created the short lived magazine “Fire”. Hughes and his contemporaries were often in conflict with the goals and aspirations of the black middle class, and of those considered to be the Midwives of the Harlem Renaissance, W.E.B Du Bois, Jessie Redmond Faucet, and Alain Leary Locke. The men of the Harlem Renaissance accused of being overly fulsome in accommodating and assimilating Eurocentric values and culture for social equality. A primary expression of this conflict was the former’s depiction of the “low –life”, that is the real lives of blacks in the lower social – economic. (Bernard, Emily)
The superficial divisions and prejudices based on skin color within the black community. Hughes wrote what would be considered the manifesto for him and his contemporaries published in the nation in 1926, “The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain”. Hughes was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé, and he didn’t go much beyond the theme of black is beautiful as he explored the black human condition in a variety of depths. Thus, his poetry and fiction centered generally on insightful views of the working class lives of blacks in America, live throw his portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African American identity and its diverse culture. (Bernard, Emily)
Hughes was quoted saying “My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind”. Therefore, in his work he confronted racial stereotypes, protested social condition, and expanded African American’s image of itself. Moreover, Hughes stressed the importance of a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism devoid of self – hated that united people of African descent and Africans across the globe and encouraged pride in their own diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. Langston Hughes was one of the few black writers of any consequence to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists. His African American race consciousness and cultural nationalism would influence many foreign black writers, such as, Jacques Romani, Nicolas Gullies, Leopold Seder Sorghum, and Amie Creasier. (Bernard, Emily)
Hughes was, with the exception of Richard Wright, the black writer most identified with communist left during the 1930s, it was undeniable. Hughes’s frequent publication of “revolutionary” poetry in the journals and press of the CPUSA, his activity in communist – initiated campaigns. In fact what is formally most interesting about Hughes’s poetry in the 1930s in that the wide variety of voices, styles, and themes employed by Hughes in the 19202 and the early 1930s and addressed to equally disparate audiences becomes largely unified by the end of the decade. This process of unification results in Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) and, ultimately, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), in which formerly distinct addresses and addresses are combined to imagine a single audience and a single subject. To draw on Bah tin’s discussion of the novel, if a diversity of speakers and auditions could be said to be retained by Hughes, this diversity is contained within a single volume in a dialogic relation rather than in different volume and journals speaking to different audiences. (Smethurt, James)
The range of addresses and addresses in Hughes’s poetry reached its zenith in early 1930s. During this period Hughes largely abandoned the types of poems that had made his 1927 “Fine Clothes to the Jew” so notorious in the black press. Poems formally rooted in the secular and sacred musical forms of the blues and gospel music, as well as in black rhetoric and representing as speaking subjects such “low life” character as prostitutes, gamblers, murderers, drunks and suicides. Instead Hughes’s published poems fell into three general categories aimed at three relatively discrete audiences; “up life” and comic poems aimed largely at an African American audience that was outside the cultural orbit of the CPUSA, and outside the groups of black intellectual’s associated. (Smethurt, James)
The same year Hughes established his theater troupe in Los Angeles, his ambition to writer for the movies materialized when he co-wrote the screenplay for “Way down South”. Further hopes by Hughes to write for the lucrative movie trade were thwarted because of racial discrimination within the industry. Through the black publication Chicago Defender, Hughes in 1943 gave creative birth to Jess B. Semple often referred to and spelled simple, the everyday black man in Harlem who offered musings on topical issues of the day. 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. Hughes wanted young black writers to be objective about their race but not Otto 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 posthumously published Panther and the Lash in 1967 was intended to show solidarity and understanding with some skill and devoid of the most virile anger and terse racial chauvinism some showed toward whites. (Olson, Charles, pg 19 and 20)
Near the fourth of July, Hughes at last needed Noel Sullivan’s entreaties and travelled north for a short visit to Carmel-by- the-Sea. There he was very warmly received at “Ennesfree” by Sullivan himself, Marie Short, Robinson and Unna Jeffers, Ella Winter, Lincoln Steffens, Martin Flavin, Albert Rhys Williams, and others in the old circle. The political tension of the previous summer had faded away. The JOHN Reed Club itself was dead- killed, ironically, not by vigilantes or the American Legion but, across the nation by decree of the Communist Party, which suddenly had found the club no longer a suitable vehicle for its radical goal. Here he continued work on his stories with Arno Bontemps. Butt their board bandit; an editor called the story dull and prosaic, and said that with to authors it suffered from a shifting point of view. (Rampersad, Arnold, pg307 and 308)
Langston Hughes was, in his later years, deemed the "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race," a title
he encouraged. Hughes meant to represent the race in his writing and he was, perhaps, the most
original of all African American poets. On May 22, 1967 Langston Hughes died after having
had abdominal surgery. Hughes' funeral, like his poetry, was all blues and jazz: the jazz pianist
Randy Weston was called and asked to play for Hughes's funeral. Very little was said by way of
eulogy, but the jazz and the blues were hot, and the final tribute to this writer so influenced by
African American musical forms were fitting. (www.kanasaheritage.org)
Work citied
Black History Bulletin. Association for study of African American Life and History.
D.C.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes Volume1: 1902-1941 I, Too, Sing America. New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986.
Desantis, Christopher C. Fight for Freedom and other writing on Civil Right (collected words of Langston Hughes, Volume 10). New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986.
Bernard, Emily (2001). Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carlvan Vechten. 1925-1964.
Smethurst, James. The new Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930- 1946. New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999.
Olson, Charles. Projective Verse. “The New American Poetry”. New York: Grave, 1960. Ed. Donald M. Allen.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes Volume 2: “I Dream A World”. New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988.
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