Langston Hughes
“The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people
Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.”
Langston Hughes wrote this poem at twenty-one. He called it “My People.”
Langston began fighting for people from a young age. In eighth grade, one of Langston’s teachers segregated her classroom, telling the black students to sit in a separate row. Langston, in turn, put cards on each desk of this row with the label Jim Crow Row on them. Then he ran outside into the schoolyard and yelled that his teacher had created a Jim Crow Row.
For his actions, the school expelled Langston. But his mother, who was not one to back down when experiencing racism, went to the school administration. Soon, Langston was back in school, and the segregated row was gone.
In many ways, this experience set the tone for Langston’s life. He was going to stand up against wrongs, particularly inequality. But while Langson faced and would face much racism, he believed in America and what he called the American Dream. The dream being equality. Though he would ask, “What happens to a dream deferred?”
Langston would dedicate many of his future writings to this question and to helping the country come closer to achieving the dream, standing up for everyone, as he would write in a poem,
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek —
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
Early Years
Langston was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1901, to Carrie M. Langston and James N. Hughes. His ancestry was a mix of African American, Native American, and white heritage. But while diverse in cultures, consistent across the generations were values passed down of the importance of education and fighting for freedom and equality.
Shortly after Langston’s birth, his parents separated, and his father moved to Mexico. After this, Langston moved to Kansas to live with his grandmother, as his mother moved often seeking work. As he began school here, Langston experienced racism, but at the same time, people fighting back against it. He wrote of the experience,
“The first two or three days, on the way home from school, little white kids, kids my own age, six and seven years old, would throw stones at me — some of them. There were other little white kids, six and seven years old, who picked up stones and threw them back at their fellow classmates, and defended me, and saw that I got home safely. So, I learned very early in life that our race problem is not really of black against white, and white against black. It’s a problem of people who are not very knowledgeable, or who have small minds, or small spirits.”
Langston’s time with his grandmother led to several important life lessons. His grandmother taught him about racial pride, instilling in him the oral traditions of his African-American heritage and inspiring him to help his race. Langston was nurtured on his grandmother’s stories about abolitionists and the struggle against slavery, influences that would deeply inform his later work.
It was also from his grandmother that Langston took another important life lesson. “Nobody ever cried in my grandmother’s stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying. When my grandmother died, I didn’t cry either. Something about my grandmother’s stories taught me the uselessness of crying about anything.”
As these lessons shaped how he felt and acted, another important development happened in these years: Langston fell in love with reading. “I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. 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,” he said.
But his entry into writing, which would define his life’s work, came by chance. He was elected class poet in grammar school. “I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everyone knows, except us, that all Negroes have rhythm, so they elected me as class poet.” He read his first poem at graduation, receiving loud applause from the crowd.
As Langston graduated high school, he knew that he wanted to continue schooling on to college. In 1921, Langston enrolled at Columbia University. As his father would only pay for tuition if Langston studied engineering, freshman year was spent in that department. He continued writing and publishing poetry on the side. But in 1922, Langston dropped out of Columbia due to racism from students and teachers.
Langston spent the next few years working worldwide until enrolling back into college at Lincoln University in 1926. He earned his B.A. and then moved back to New York City, where he immersed himself in the Harlem Renaissance.
Career
“I wanted to write seriously and as well as I knew how about the Negro people, and make that kind of writing earn for me a living.” — Langston Hughes
Langston would become pivotal in the Harlem Renaissance and, for years after, enriching American literature. He wrote plays and prose, children’s books, and autobiographies. His writing vividly represented lived experiences, particularly the black American working-class experience, encapsulating their struggles, joys, and resilience. His work mirrored the complexity and richness of black life, showcasing its vibrancy and dynamism during a time when such narratives were often marginalized.
About his writing, Langston would say,
“The moon belongs to everybody. But not this American earth of ours. That is perhaps why poems about the moon perturb no one, but poems about color and poverty do perturb many citizens. Social forces pull backwards or forwards, right or left, and social poems get caught in the pulling and hauling. Sometimes the poet himself gets pulled and hauled — even hauled off to jail.”
Langston never went to jail. But he was detained. And he was censored. And at times banned from places. Yet, through the challenges, he continued to be a social poet, writing about life topics and pushing American society towards the American Dream. And he continued to be an advocate for black Americans and black American writers. One writer wrote about Langston,
“Langston set a tone, a standard of brotherhood and friendship and cooperation, for all of us to follow. You never got from him, ‘I am the Negro writer,’ but only ‘I am a Negro writer.’ He never stopped thinking about the rest of us.”
Langston passed away in 1967.
Sources:
- Bloom, Harold. “Langston Hughes.” Philadelphia, Chelsea House Publishers, 2002.
- “Dream Deferred,” in Langston Hughes, The Panther and the Lash, Poems of Our Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1967). p. 14
- Hughes, Langston. “My Adventures as a Social Poet. Phylon, https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20080528221214/http://negroartist.com/writings/My%20Adventures%20as%20a%20Social%20Poet.pdf
- Hughes, Langston. “Let America Be America Again.” https://poets.org/poem/let-america-be-america-again
- “Langston Hughes.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes
- National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; acquired through the generosity of Elizabeth Ann Hylton, NPG.2011.101
- PRESLEY, JAMES. “The American Dream of Langston Hughes.” Southwest Review, vol. 48, no. 4, 1963, pp. 380–86. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43467552. Accessed 8 Nov. 2023.
- Scott, Mark. “Langston Hughes of Kansas.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 66, no. 1, 1981, pp. 1–9. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2716871. Accessed 9 Nov. 2023.
