Hughes, Langston

HUGHES, LANGSTON (1902–1967). African American poet, playwright, novelist, and journalist, Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, but grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, and Cleveland, Ohio, before settling later in Harlem. His dedication to the ideal of social justice was first developed by his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, whose first husband had died at Harpers Ferry in John Brown’s band, and whose second husband (Hughes’s grandfather) had also been an ardent abolitionist. In Cleveland, Hughes was introduced to socialism by certain high school classmates, many of whom were the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia. As an emerging poet, he was shaped decisively by the democratic modernist Carl Sandburg but also found Claude McKay, then an associate of Max Eastman and other New York leftists, an ideal role model of the black writer committed at once to socialism, black progress, and literary excellence.

After a year at Columbia University (1921–1922), Hughes undertook a series of menial jobs that increased his ties to the black working class. A trip in 1923 down the west coast of Africa intensified his dislike of European colonialism, and on his return he began to publish in radical journals such as the Messenger, in addition to his usual showing in the magazines of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League. Two books of verse, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), as well as the novel Not without Laughter (1930), established him as the major young writer of the Harlem Renaissance. But the onset of the Depression, the decline of the Renaissance, and a traumatic experience with a wealthy white patron drove him about 1930 to reassess his art and life.

Turning sharply leftward, in 1931 he visited Haiti and Cuba and denounced American imperialism there in the New Masses. Also visiting the “Scottsboro Boys” in prison in Alabama, he openly sided with their Communist lawyers in their controversy with the NAACP over the case. He spent a year (1932–1933) in the Soviet Union, to which he had gone to help make a film (soon abandoned) about American race relations. Warmly received, he wrote several radical poems, including “Good Morning Revolution” and “Goodbye Christ,” as well as a short book, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (1934), in praise of the Soviet treatment of its darker peoples. In 1934 he wrote “One More ‘S’ in the U.S.A.” (to make it Soviet) for a national Communist Party convention. The same year, he was elected president of the Communist-backed League of Struggle for Negro Rights. In 1938, after three months in Madrid as a war correspondent, he founded the Harlem Suitcase Theater, which staged his Don’t You Want to Be Free?” This play loosely combined some of his strongest poems about race with the music of the blues and exhortations about class consciousness and unity. The same year, he published a collection of radical verse, A New Song (1938), with an introduction by literary radical Mike Gold.

Such involvements made many people think of Hughes as a Communist, but he always denied Party membership. Although he lent his name to many organizations, his personal involvement, as in the case of the League, was usually token. With the Nazi-Soviet Pact taxing his socialist sympathies, World War II found Hughes in retreat from radicalism. An autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), contained virtually no reference to the Left. That year, after an attack by a right-wing group, he repudiated “Goodbye Christ” and declared his radicalism an error of his youth. Thereafter he published mainly in centrist journals, where he stressed the evils of Jim Crow. Late in the decade he published his first purely “lyrical” or nonpolitical volume of verse, Fields of Wonder (1947), and sounded few pro-Marxist notes in his later volumes One-Way Ticket (1949), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Ask Your Mama (1961), and The Panther and the Lash (1967). However, in certain poems during the war, such as “Good Morning Stalingrad,” about Soviet heroism, he showed deep admiration of the Soviet people, and now and then he defended the American Left in his weekly column in the Chicago Defender. In 1948 he publicly endorsed Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace for president, and in 1949 Hughes so vivdly condemned the prosecution in New York of twelve Communist leaders that the regional Communist Party asked (and received) his permission to reprint the essay.

Toward the end of the 1940s, as his prestige rose with the success of efforts such as the musical play Street Scene (1947) with Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice, right-wing harassment at his many public readings increased. He came under closer scrutiny by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In March 1953 a subpoena brought him before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigating committee. Hughes named no names, but generally cooperated with McCarthy. Later in the fifties he further offended the Left by omitting leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, long known and admired by Hughes, from certain of his books for young persons in which they clearly belonged. At a public celebration of Robeson’s sixtieth birthday, Du Bois rebuked Hughes for his treatment of Robeson.

To some extent, Hughes regretted his public break with the Left. But his main commitment from the start had been to black Americans as an embattled group, and his unprecedented career as a black writer living only by his pen depended on his close relationship to local black communities. Psychologically, too, he seemed incapable of enduring the ostracism and isolation visited on leaders like Du Bois and Robeson. Instead, he chose to safeguard his position as the most representative and most beloved of black writers.

Berry, Faith, ed. Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings by Langston Hughes. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973.

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. 1, 1902–1941. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. 11, 1941–1967. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Langston Hughes Papers. Collection Overview. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University. https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/resources/969

Langston Hughes, 1902-1967. Poets.org website. https://poets.org/poet/langston-hughes