James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist.
Background
Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, United States, the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934). His parents soon separated, and Hughes was reared mainly by his mother, his maternal grandmother, and a childless couple named Reed. Hughes spent the next year in Mexico with his father, who tried to discourage him from writing.
Later in 1924 Hughes went to live with his mother in Washington, D. C. The boy's hardworking, respectability-seeking mother provides a counterpoint to his high-spirited, easy-laughing, footloose father.
Education
Langston attended public schools in Kansas and Illinois, graduating from high school in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1920. His high school companions, most of whom were white, remembered him as a handsome "Indian-looking" youth whom everyone liked and respected for his quiet, natural ways and his abilities.
Later, Hughes enrolled at Columbia University. He hoped to earn enough money to return to college, but work as a hotel busboy paid very little, and he failed. Hughes earned a B.A. degree from Lincoln University in 1929.
Langston did odd jobs in New York. In 1923 he signed on as steward on a freighter. His first voyage took him down the west coast of Africa; his second took him to Spain. In 1924 he spent 6 months in Paris.
Langston's first written work was "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", it was published in 1921. Later he finished his first book of poetry The Weary Blues (1926). His casual-seeming, folklike style, reflecting the simplicity and the earthy sincerity of his people, was strengthened in his second book, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).
In 1932, Hughes became part of a group of black people who went to the Soviet Union to make a film depicting the plight of African Americans in the United States. The film was never made, but Hughes was given the opportunity to travel extensively through the Soviet Union and to the Soviet-controlled regions in Central Asia, the latter parts usually closed to Westerners. Hughes also managed to travel to China and Japan before returning to the States.
In 1931 he made the first of what became annual lecture tours. He wrote some 20 plays, including Mulatto, Simply Heavenly, and Tambourines to Glory. He translated Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet, and Gabriela Mistral, the Latin American Nobel laureate poet, and wrote two long autobiographical works.
In Chicago, Hughes founded The Skyloft Players in 1941, which sought to nurture black playwrights and offer theatre "from the black perspective." Soon thereafter, he was hired to write a column for the Chicago Defender. The column ran for twenty years. Between 1942 and 1949 Hughes was a frequent writer and served on the editorial board of Common Ground, a literary magazine focused on cultural pluralism in the United States published by the Common Council for American Unity (CCAU). In 1949, he spent three months at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools as a visiting lecturer.
From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Hughes' popularity among the younger generation of black writers varied even as his reputation increased worldwide. He often helped writers by offering advice and introducing them to other influential persons in the literature and publishing communities. This latter group, including Alice Walker, whom Hughes discovered, looked upon Hughes as a hero and an example to be emulated within their own work. He died on May 22, 1967 in New York City, New York, United States.
Langston Hughes was one of the few prominent black writers to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists. He also was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes helped form the "New York Suitcase Theater", founded The Skyloft Players. Among Hughes' most famous works are the poetry collections Shakespeare in Harlem, Montage of a Dream Deferred, and The Panther and the Lash.
Hughes was drawn to the promise of Communism as an alternative to a segregated America. Hughes initially did not favor black American involvement in the World War II because of the persistence of discriminatory U.S. laws and racial segregation and disfranchisement throughout the South. He came to support the war effort and black American participation after deciding that war service would aid their struggle for civil rights at home.
Views
Hughes tried to depict the "low-life" in his art, that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata. He criticized the divisions and prejudices within the black community based on skin color. Hughes stressed a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism devoid of self-hate. His thought united people of African descent and Africa across the globe to encourage pride in their diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic.
Quotations:
"My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind."
Membership
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Young black writer Loften Mitchell observed of Hughes:
"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."
Connections
Langston was never married.
Father:
James Nathaniel Hughes
Mother:
Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston
Brother:
John Mercer Langston
He worked for the abolitionist cause and helped lead the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society
