So Much History

Langston Hughes, or James Mercer Langston Hughes, was a poet, novelist, playwright, librettist, essayist, and translator who was an important figure from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts movement of the 1960's. He made the African American experience the subject of his writings, which ranged from poetry and plays to novels and newspaper columns. Born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902 James Langston Hughes was the great-nephew of John Mercer Langston, who was the first African American to be elected to public office, in 1855. His mother, Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, was from an activist family respected in both the Black and white communities. She was a creative woman who taught, acted, and wrote poetry. His father, James Nathaniel Hughes, had studied law, but had been denied an appearance before the Oklahoma Law Review Board to obtain a license.

His parents separated soon after his birth, and his mother traveled for work. Hughes lived variously with his maternal grandmother, his mother, his father, and family friends. Langston spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas where he was raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, for the first thirteen years of his life until her death. His years with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, had a profound influence on him because she passed on her love of literature and sense of social justice. She was a cultured woman who encouraged Hughes’s reading and writing. She relayed her gift for storytelling through tales of slavery, heroism, and family heritage. Hughes immersed himself in books, a near-obsession that did not alleviate his isolation but helped with the loneliness. 

His mother married Homer Clark, a steel mill worker in Lincoln, Illinois. The couple settled in Cleveland, Ohio with Langston and his younger brother. Langston was fiercely independent from an early age. When his mother and brother followed his stepfather to Chicago in search of higher wages, Langston stayed in Cleveland to finish high school. Hughes attended Central High School but began writing poetry as early as the eighth grade. While in high school he was selected as class poet. His writing talent was recognized by his high school teachers and classmates, and Hughes had his first pieces of verse published in the "Central High Monthly", a sophisticated school magazine. Soon he was on the staff of the Monthly, and publishing in the magazine regularly. An English teacher introduced him to poets such as  Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman, and these became Hughes' earliest influences.

Most of his high school friends there were Jewish, the children of immigrant families steeped in socialist traditions. These families were much more welcoming than he found most Ohioans. He became familiar with socialist causes and leaders, such as Eugene V. Debs, and attended many speaker forums. It was during this time that he first heard the call of the written word. He wrote the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” the summer after his graduation from high school in Cleveland Central High in 1920. It was published in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) newspaper "The Crisis" in 1921 and brought him considerable attention. Soon, his maternal father reentered his life. James Hughes was living in Toluca, Mexico, and wanted his son to join him there. Langston had a very poor relationship with his father, whom he seldom saw when a child. He grew to detest the man for his bias against people of color.

Hughes’s relationship with his father was further strained because James sought to dissuade him from pursuing a life as a writer, urging him to go to an international school and learn a more manly trade. They finally settled on an arrangement wherein James would help finance Hughes’s studies at Columbia University in New York City as long as he studied engineering instead of literature. After only a year, Langston dropped out of the program. Although he had good grades, his heart remained faithful to writing poetry. He enrolled at Columbia University in New York City in 1921 and became a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance movement. While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade average. He published poetry in the Columbia Daily Spectator under a pen name. He did not enjoy his experiences at Columbia, but he loved the community he found in Harlem, New York.

Langston's father paid his tuition, but he eventually dropped out after facing racial prejudice on campus. After Hughes left Columbia, he worked at various odd jobs before beginning a two-year stint as a ship’s crewman, during which he traveled to, and spent considerable time in, western Africa, Spain, and France. His first voyage took him down the west coast of Africa, as a crew member aboard the boat SS Malone. The African experience reenforced Hughes’s determination to celebrate his blackness. He loved the variety of the continent, with its green hills, dark-skinned people, and tall palm trees. His second took him to Spain and  Europe. Hughes lived in in Paris, France for part of 1924, where he eked out a living as a doorman and met Black jazz musicians. During his time in England, Hughes became part of the Black expatriate community. In November 1924, Hughes returned to the United States to live with his mother in Washington, D.C. In 1925, he became the personal assistant of historian Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

Not satisfied with the demands of the work and its time constraints that limited his writing, Hughes quit to work as a busboy in a hotel. It was in the nation’s capital that, while working as a busboy, he slipped his poetry to the noted poet Vachel Lindsay, cited as the father of modern singing poetry, who helped connect Hughes to the literary world. The noted poet Vachel Lindsay, cited as the father of modern singing poetry, helped connect Hughes to the literary world. Impressed with the poems Hughes showed him, Lindsay publicized his discovery of a new Black poet. Hughes won the "Opportunity" magazine's poetry prize in 1925, the National Urban League's official publication. In 1924, Charlotte Mason became Hughes’s patron, giving him two happy years of financial security and encouragement. She oversaw the publication of Hughes’s collection of poems "The Weary Blues". In 1926 he wrote “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"  published in The Nation, a manifesto in which he called for a confident, uniquely Black literature.

Hughes received a scholarship to, and began attending, Lincoln University in early 1926. There he became a member of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, that was founded at Howard University in Washington, D.C.  Future Associate Justice of the U.S Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, was an alumnus and classmate of Hughes during his undergraduate studies at Lincoln University, along side Kwame Nkrumah, the future president of Ghana. That same year, Langston received the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Award. Reactions to Hughes’s poetry varied. African American presses were the most critical, fearing that he was furthering negative stereotypes. His second collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), was widely criticized, especially in the Black press.

Hughes spent time in the South, chronicling racial injustices, learning about the lives of the people of color located in the area, and reading his poetry. His tour and willingness to deliver free programs when necessary helped many get acquainted with the Harlem Renaissance. In the spring of 1927, he was asked to perform his poems at Fisk University, and at a Young Women's Christian Association convention in Texas. During this travel Langston met, on July 23, 1927, Zora Neale Hurston on a Passenger Terminal in Mobile, Alabama. Because Zora owned a car, they both decided to travel together and document folk songs and local behaviors of Black people in the south. They visited the Tuskegee Institute, where they met with writer Jessie Fauset, posing them in a photo in front of Booker T. Washington's grave. Langston was specifically asked by the university to write a poem that would be used as an anthem for the institute and as a way to honor Washington's memory. The requested work would only be published in 1928 and sent to the university under the name of "Alabama Earth".

Hughes received his bachelor degree from Lincoln University 1929 and soon returned to New York. He then wrote "Not Without Laughter," his first novel, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature in 1930. The story portrays an African American boy, Sandy, caught between two worlds and two attitudes. The boy's hardworking and respectable mother provides a counterpoint to his energetic, easygoing, footloose father. His mother is oriented to the middle-class values of the white world. The father believes that fun and laughter are the only things worth pursuing. Though the boy's character is blurred, Hughes's attention to the details of African American culture in America gives the novel insight and power. It won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature. At a time before widespread arts grants, Hughes gained the support of private patrons and he was supported for two years prior to publishing this novel.