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Langston Hughes Langston Hughes For other uses, see Langston Hughes (disambiguation). James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the pe- riod that “the negro was in vogue”, which was later para- phrased as “when Harlem was in vogue”.[1] 1 Biography 1.1 Ancestry and childhood Both of Hughes’ paternal great-grandmothers were African-American and both of his paternal great- grandfathers were white slave owners of Kentucky. Ac- cording to Hughes, one of these men was Sam Clay, a Scottish-American whiskey distiller of Henry County and supposedly a relative of Henry Clay, and the other was Silas Cushenberry a Jewish-American slave trader of Clark County.[2][3] Hughes’s maternal grandmother Mary Patterson was of African-American, French, English and Native American descent. One of the first women to at- Hughes in 1902 tend Oberlin College, she first married Lewis Sheridan Leary, also of mixed race. Lewis Sheridan Leary subse- quently joined John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry in After the separation of his parents, while his mother trav- 1859 and died from his wounds.[3] eled seeking employment, young Langston Hughes was In 1869 the widow Mary Patterson Leary married raised mainly by his maternal grandmother, Mary Patter- again, into the elite, politically active Langston fam- son Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. Through the black ily. Her second husband was Charles Henry Langston, American oral tradition and drawing from the activist ex- of African-American, Native American, and Euro- periences of her generation, Mary Langston instilled in American ancestry.[4][5] He and his younger brother John her grandson a lasting sense of racial pride.[10][11][12] He Mercer Langston worked for the abolitionist cause and spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. After helped lead the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society [6] in 1858. the death of his grandmother, he went to live with family Charles Langston later moved to Kansas, where he was friends, James and Mary Reed, for two years. In his 1940 active as an educator and activist for voting and rights for autobiography The Big Sea he wrote: “I was unhappy for African Americans.[4] Charles and Mary’s daughter Car- a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grand- oline was the mother of Langston Hughes.[7] mother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the sec- and I began to believe in nothing but books and the won- ond child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer derful world in books — where if people suffered, they [8] suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934). [13] Langston Hughes grew up in a series of Midwestern small we did in Kansas.” towns. Hughes’s father left his family and later divorced Later, Hughes lived again with his mother Carrie in Carrie, going to Cuba, and then Mexico, seeking to es- Lincoln, Illinois. She had remarried when he was still an cape the enduring racism in the United States.[9] adolescent, and eventually they lived in Cleveland, Ohio, 1 2 1 BIOGRAPHY where he attended high school. tant to the historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association While in grammar school in Lincoln, Hughes was elected for the Study of African American Life and History. As class poet. Hughes stated that in retrospect he thought the work demands limited his time for writing, Hughes it was because of the stereotype that African Americans quit the position to work as a busboy at the Wardman Park have rhythm.[14] Hotel. There he encountered the poet Vachel Lindsay, with whom he shared some poems. Impressed with the poems, Lindsay publicized his discovery of a new black I was a victim of a stereotype. There were poet. By this time, Hughes’s earlier work had been pub- only two of us Negro kids in the whole class lished in magazines and was about to be collected into his and our English teacher was always stressing first book of poetry. the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, ev- eryone knows, except us, that all Negroes have rhythm, so they elected me as class poet.[15] During high school in Cleveland, he wrote for the school newspaper, edited the yearbook, and began to write his first short stories, poetry, and dramatic plays. His first piece of jazz poetry, “When Sue Wears Red”, was written while he was in high school. 1.2 Relationship with father Hughes had a very poor relationship with his father. He lived with his father in Mexico for a brief period in 1919. Upon graduating from high school in June 1920, Hughes returned to Mexico to live with his father, hoping to con- vince him to support Langston’s plan to attend Columbia University. Hughes later said that, prior to arriving in Mexico: “I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn't understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much.”[16][17] Initially, his father had hoped for Hughes to attend a university abroad, and to study for a career in engineering. On these grounds, he was willing to pro- vide financial assistance to his son but did not support his desire to be a writer. Eventually, Hughes and his fa- ther came to a compromise: Hughes would study engi- Hughes at university in 1928 neering, so long as he could attend Columbia. His tu- ition provided; Hughes left his father after more than a The following year, Hughes enrolled in Lincoln Uni- year. While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to versity, a historically black university in Chester maintain a B+ grade average. He left in 1922 because of County, Pennsylvania. He joined the Omega Psi Phi racial prejudice, and his interests revolved more around fraternity.[20][21] Thurgood Marshall, who later became the neighborhood of Harlem than his studies, though he an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United [18] continued writing poetry. States, was an alumnus and classmate of Langston Hughes during his undergraduate studies at Lincoln Uni- 1.3 Adulthood versity. After Hughes earned a B.A. degree from Lincoln Univer- Hughes worked various odd jobs, before serving a sity in 1929, he returned to New York. Except for travels brief tenure as a crewman aboard the S.S. Malone in to the Soviet Union and parts of the Caribbean, Hughes 1923, spending six months traveling to West Africa and lived in Harlem as his primary home for the remainder of Europe.[19] In Europe, Hughes left the S.S. Malone for a his life. During the 1930s, Hughes became a resident of temporary stay in Paris. Westfield, New Jersey.[22][23] During his time in England in the early 1920s, Hughes be- Some academics and biographers today believe that came part of the black expatriate community. In Novem- Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes ber 1924, he returned to the U.S. to live with his mother in in many of his poems, similar in manner to Walt Washington, D.C. Hughes worked at various odd jobs be- Whitman. Hughes has cited him as an influence fore gaining a white-collar job in 1925 as a personal assis- on his poetry. Hughes’s story “Blessed Assurance” 3 deals with a father’s anger over his son’s effeminacy I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. and “queerness”.[24][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] The biogra- I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln pher Aldrich argues that, in order to retain the respect and went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy support of black churches and organizations and avoid ex- bosom turn all golden in the sunset.... acerbating his precarious financial situation, Hughes re- [31] “ mained closeted. ” in The Weary Blues (1926)[36] First published in The Crisis in 1921, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, which became Hughes’s signature poem, was collected in his first book of poetry The Weary Blues (1926).[37] Hughes’s first and last published poems ap- peared in The Crisis; more of his poems were published in The Crisis than in any other journal.[38] Hughes’s life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, alongside those of his contem- poraries, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas. Except for McKay, they worked together also to create the short-lived magazine Fire!! Devoted to Hughes’s ashes are interred under a cosmogram medallion in the Younger Negro Artists. foyer of the Arthur Schomburg Center in Harlem Hughes and his contemporaries had different goals and aspirations than the black middle class. They criticized Arnold Rampersad, the primary biographer of Hughes, the men known as the midwives of the Harlem Renais- determined that Hughes exhibited a preference for other sance: W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and [32] African-American men in his work and life. How- Alain LeRoy Locke, as being overly accommodating and ever, Rampersad denies Hughes’s homosexuality in his assimilating eurocentric values and culture to achieve so- [33] biography. Rampersad concludes that Hughes was cial equality. probably asexual and passive in his sexual relationships.
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