Introducing Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes
(1901-1967)

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1901, but he is most associated with a section of New York City known as Harlem.

Langston grew up all over the Midwest, as his father left the family soon after Langston was born, and his parents later divorced.  His mother was a schoolteacher and moved around frequently to find work, probably because there weren't a lot of African-American schools in the early 1900s, especially out in the mainly-white Midwest.  Langston was mainly raised by his maternal grandmother in Lawrence Kansas.  

Langston's grandmother taught him to be proud of his race, not ashamed of being black.  She taught him that being poor is not a sin, and that being rich is not a path to salvation.  And she taught him to love America, even though it was a difficult place for black people to live in at that time.  

Young Langston was often deeply unhappy over basically being abandoned by both his parents.  He often escaped into reading books because "Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas."  After his grandmother died, he lived with some friends for two years, then moved in with his mother and her new husband in Cleveland, Ohio.  He went to high school there, where he began writing plays, poetry, short stories, and articles for the school newspaper.

After high school, Langston traveled to Mexico to see his father and ask him to support Langston's college ambitions.  His father agreed to help pay for his tuition if he would study engineering, not writing.  Langston finally agreed to that (but not to stopping writing), and he enrolled in Columbia University in New York City in 1921.

Langston left college after a little over a year because of the racial prejudice he experienced from professors, fellow students, and the college system itself, which initially refused to let him live in the dormitories because he was black.  After leaving college, he spent a little time in the mainly black neighborhood called Harlem before taking a job on a ship that enabled him to go to Africa and Europe.  He stayed in Paris for a while, lived in England for quite a while, and finally returned to the US in 1924.  All the time, he was still writing, mainly poetry.

When he came back to America, he worked odd jobs for a while before enrolling in Lincoln University, a black university in Pennsylvania.  This time, he stayed in school, earning his B.A. in 1929.  After that, he lived in Harlem, NYC, for the rest of his life, aside from traveling now and then.  

His reputation as a "jazz poet" (a poet whose writing feels very rhythmic and improvisational, like jazz music) grew throughout the 1920s.  Hughes particularly focuses his poetry (and fiction) on working-class people, striving to highlight their humanity and dignity, joy and courage.  He tried to help other black people see that their skin color was not something to be ashamed of, and that their cultural history was rich and worth celebrating.  

By the end of the 1920s, he was considered the leader of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that celebrated and promoted African-American art in all forms: music, literature, theatre, dance, film, and the visual arts.  Not everyone involved in the Harlem Renaissance actually lived in Harlem, but the movement was centered there.  Because Langston Hughes did live in Harlem, he was a natural leader and spokesperson for the movement, which lasted on through the 1930s.

In his poetry, fiction, and many essays, Hughes celebrated the experience of being a black American without promoting any kind of hate of those who are different.  Instead of being divided by differences, he wanted people of every race to embrace and enjoy them.  Just as he insisted there was nothing wrong with being black, he also insisted there was nothing wrong with being white, or any other race.  This made him some enemies among militant racists, both black and white, but he continued insisting that if America was a multicultural nation, then all the cultures that formed it should be celebrated.

Langston Hughes died in 1967.  Although his writing and views about race had come to be viewed as old-fashioned and unprogressive by many black intellectuals and artists during the 1950s, he was still beloved by the common black people who were the subjects of so many of his poems.  His steady insistence on not hating people who are different from you had won him fans of every color around the globe.  His poems remains some of the most delightful and delighted-in American poetry.