James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901[1] – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist fromJoplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary form calledjazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of theHarlem Renaissance.
Growing up in theMidwest, Hughes became a prolific writer at an early age. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career. He studied atColumbia University in New York City. Although he dropped out, he gained notice from New York publishers, first inThe Crisis magazine and then from book publishers, and became known in the creative community in Harlem. His first poetry collection,The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. Hughes eventually graduated fromLincoln University.
In addition to poetry, Hughes wrote plays and published short story collections, novels, and several nonfiction works. From 1942 to 1962, as thecivil rights movement gained traction, Hughes wrote an in-depth weekly opinion column in a leading black newspaper,The Chicago Defender.
Ancestry and childhood
Like many African-Americans, Hughes was of mixed ancestry. Both of Hughes's paternal great-grandmothers were enslaved Africans, and both of his paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners in Kentucky. According to Hughes, one of these men was Sam Clay, a Scottish-American whiskey distiller ofHenry County, said to be a relative of statesmanHenry Clay. The other putative paternal ancestor whom Hughes named was Silas Cushenberry, aslave trader ofClark County, who Hughes claimed to beJewish.[2][3][4] Hughes's maternal grandmother,Mary Patterson, was of African-American, French, English and Native American descent. One of the first women to attendOberlin College, she marriedLewis Sheridan Leary, also ofmixed-race descent, before her studies. In 1859, Lewis Leary joinedJohn Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in West Virginia, where he was fatally wounded.[3]
Ten years later, in 1869, the widow Mary Patterson Leary married again, into the elite, politically active Langston family. Her second husband wasCharles Henry Langston, of African-American, Euro-American and Native American ancestry.[5][6] He and his younger brother,John Mercer Langston, worked for theabolitionist cause and helped lead theOhio Anti-Slavery Society in 1858.[7]
After their marriage, Charles Langston moved with his family to Kansas, where he was active as an educator and activist for voting and rights for African Americans.[5] His and Mary's daughterCaroline (known as Carrie) became a schoolteacher and married James Nathaniel Hughes. They had two children; the second was Langston Hughes, born in 1901 inJoplin, Missouri[8] (though Hughes himself claims in his autobiography to have been born in 1902).[9]
Hughes in 1902
Langston Hughes grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns. His father left the family soon after the boy was born and later divorced Carrie. The senior Hughes traveled to Cuba and then Mexico, seeking to escape the enduringracism in the United States.[10]
After the separation, Hughes's mother traveled, seeking employment. Langston was raised mainly inLawrence, Kansas, by his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston. Through the black Americanoral tradition and drawing from the activist experiences of her generation, Mary Langston instilled in her grandson a lasting sense of racial pride.[11][12] Imbued by his grandmother with a duty to help his race, Hughes identified with neglected and downtrodden black people all his life, and glorified them in his work.[13] He lived most of his childhood in Lawrence. In his 1940 autobiographyThe Big Sea, he wrote: "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—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas."[14]
After the death of his grandmother, Hughes went to live with family friends, James and Auntie Mary Reed, for two years. Later, Hughes lived again with his mother Carrie inLincoln, Illinois. She had remarried when he was an adolescent. The family moved to theFairfax neighborhood ofCleveland,Ohio, where he attendedCentral High School[15] and was taught byHelen Maria Chesnutt, whom he found inspiring.[16]
His writing experiments began when he was young. While ingrammar school in Lincoln, Hughes was elected class poet. He stated that in retrospect he thought it was because of the stereotype about African Americans having rhythm.[17]
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.[18]
During high school in Cleveland, Hughes wrote for the school newspaper, edited the yearbook, and began to write his first short stories, poetry,[19] and dramatic plays. His first piece of jazz poetry, "When Sue Wears Red", was written while he was in high school.[20]
Education
Hughes had a very poor relationship with his father, whom he seldom saw when a child. He lived briefly with his father in Mexico in 1919. Upon graduating from high school in June 1920, Hughes returned to Mexico to live with his father, hoping to convince him to support his plan to attendColumbia 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."[21][22] His father had hoped Hughes would choose to study at a university abroad and train for a career in engineering. He was willing to provide financial assistance to his son on these grounds, but did not support his desire to be a writer. Eventually, Hughes and his father came to a compromise: Hughes would study engineering, so long as he could attend Columbia. His tuition provided, Hughes left his father after more than a year.
While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade average. He published poetry in theColumbia Daily Spectator under a pen name.[23] He left in 1922 because of racial prejudice among students and teachers. He was denied a room on campus because he was black.[24] Eventually he settled inHartley Hall, but he still suffered from racism among his classmates, who seemed hostile to anyone who did not fit into aWASP category.[25] He was attracted more to the African-American people and neighborhood ofHarlem than to his studies, but he continued writing poetry.[26] Harlem was a center of vibrant cultural life.
Hughes at Lincoln University in 1928
Hughes worked at various odd jobs before serving a brief tenure as acrewman aboard the S.S.Malone in 1923, spending six months traveling to West Africa and Europe.[27] In Europe, Hughes left the S.S.Malone for a temporary stay in Paris.[28] There he met and had a romance with Anne Marie Coussey, a British-educated African from a well-to-doGold Coast family; they subsequently corresponded, but she eventually marriedHugh Wooding, a promisingTrinidadian lawyer.[29][30] Wooding later served as chancellor of theUniversity of the West Indies.[31]
After Hughes earned aB.A. degree from Lincoln University in 1929, he returned to New York. Except for travels to theSoviet Union and parts of theCaribbean, he lived in Harlem as his primary home for the remainder of his life. During the 1930s, he became a resident ofWestfield, New Jersey for a time, sponsored by his patronCharlotte Osgood Mason.[34][35]
Sexuality
Some academics and biographers believe that Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, as didWalt Whitman, who Hughes said influenced his poetry. Hughes's story "Blessed Assurance" deals with a father's anger over his son's effeminacy and "queerness".[36][37][38][39][40][41] Additionally, Sandra L. West, author of theEncyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, contends that his homosexual love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover.[42] The biographer Aldrich argues that, in order to retain the respect and support ofblack churches and organizations and avoid exacerbating his precarious financial situation, Hughes remainedcloseted.[43]
However,Arnold Rampersad, Hughes' primary biographer, concludes that the author was probablyasexual and passive in his sexual relationships rather than homosexual,[44] despite noting that he exhibited a preference for African-American men in his work and life, finding them "sexually fascinating".[45]
Career
from "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1920) ... My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln —went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy —bosom turn all golden in the sunset. ...
Hughes and his contemporaries had different goals and aspirations than theblack middle class. Hughes and his fellows tried to depict the "low-life" in their art, that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata. They criticized thedivisions and prejudices within the black community based on skin color.[50] Hughes wrote what would be considered their manifesto, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain", published inThe Nation in 1926:
The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. Thetom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.[51]
His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture. "My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind",[52] Hughes is quoted as saying. He confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America's image of itself; a "people's poet" who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality.[53]
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.
Hughes stressed a racial consciousness andcultural nationalism devoid of self-hate. His thought united people of African descent and Africa across the globe to encourage pride in their diverse blackfolk culture andblack aesthetic. Hughes was one of the few prominent black writers to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists.[55] His African-American race consciousness and cultural nationalism would influence many foreign black writers, includingJacques Roumain,Nicolás Guillén,Léopold Sédar Senghor, andAimé Césaire. Along with the works of Senghor, Césaire, and otherFrench-speaking writers of Africa and of African descent from the Caribbean, such asRené Maran fromMartinique andLéon Damas fromFrench Guiana in South America, the works of Hughes helped to inspire theNégritude movement in France. A radical black self-examination was emphasized in the face ofEuropean colonialism.[56][57] In addition to his example in social attitudes, Hughes had an important technical influence by his emphasis on folk and jazz rhythms as the basis of his poetry of racial pride.[58]
In 1930, his first novel,Not Without Laughter, won theHarmon 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.[59] The protagonist of the story is a boy named Sandy, whose family must deal with a variety of struggles due to their race and class, in addition to relating to one another.
In 1931, Hughes helped form the "New York Suitcase Theater" with playwright Paul Peters, artistJacob Burck, and writer (soon-to-be underground spy)Whittaker Chambers, an acquaintance from Columbia.[60] In 1932, he was part of a board to produce a Soviet film on "Negro Life" withMalcolm Cowley,Floyd Dell, and Chambers.[60]
In 1931,Prentiss Taylor and Langston Hughes created theGolden Stair Press, issuing broadsides and books featuring the artwork of Prentiss Taylor and the texts of Langston Hughes. In 1932 they issued The Scottsboro Limited based on the trial of theScottsboro Boys.[61]
In 1932, Hughes and Ellen Winter wrote a pageant toCaroline Decker in an attempt to celebrate her work with the striking coal miners of theHarlan County War, but it was never performed. It was judged to be a "long, artificial propaganda vehicle too complicated and too cumbersome to be performed."[62]
Maxim Lieber became his literary agent, 1933–1945 and 1949–1950. (Chambers and Lieber worked in the underground together around 1934–1935.)[63]
Hughes's first collection of short stories was published in 1934 withThe Ways of White Folks. He finished the book at "Ennesfree" aCarmel-by-the-Sea, California, cottage provided for a year by Noel Sullivan, another patron since 1933.[64] These stories are a series of vignettes revealing the humorous and tragic interactions between whites and blacks. Overall, they are marked by a general pessimism about race relations, as well as a sardonic realism.[64]: p207
He also became an advisory board member to the (then) newly formedSan Francisco Workers' School (later theCalifornia Labor School). In 1935, Hughes received aGuggenheim Fellowship. The same year that Hughes established his theatre troupe in Los Angeles, he realized an ambition related to films by co-writing the screenplay forWay Down South, co-written withClarence Muse, African-American Hollywood actor and musician.[64]: p366-369 Hughes believed his failure to gain more work in the lucrative movie trade was due to racial discrimination within the industry.
In 1937 Hughes wrote the long poem,Madrid, his reaction to an assignment to write about black Americans volunteering in theSpanish Civil War. His poem, accompanied by 9 etchings evoking the pathos of the Spanish Civil War by Canadian artistDalla Husband, was published in 1939 as a hardcover bookMadrid 1937, printed by Gonzalo Moré, Paris, intended to be an edition of 50. One example of the book,Madrid 37, signed in pencil and annotated as II [Roman numeral two] has appeared on the rare book market.[65]
In Chicago, Hughes foundedThe Skyloft Players in 1941, which sought to nurture black playwrights and offer theatre "from the black perspective."[66] Soon thereafter, he was hired to write a column for theChicago Defender, in which he presented some of his "most powerful and relevant work", giving voice to black people. The column ran for twenty years. Hughes also mentored writerRichard Durham[67] who would later produce a sequence about Hughes in the radio seriesDestination Freedom.[68] In 1943, Hughes began publishing stories about a character he called Jesse B. Semple, often referred to and spelled "Simple", the everyday black man in Harlem who offered musings on topical issues of the day.[66] Although Hughes seldom responded to requests to teach at colleges, in 1947 he taught atAtlanta University. In 1949, he spent three months at theUniversity of Chicago Laboratory Schools as a visiting lecturer. Between 1942 and 1949, Hughes was a frequent writer and served on the editorial board ofCommon Ground, a literary magazine focused on cultural pluralism in the United States published by the Common Council for American Unity (CCAU).
He wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, and works for children. With the encouragement of his best friend and writer,Arna Bontemps, and patron and friend,Carl Van Vechten, he wrote two volumes of autobiography,The Big Sea andI Wonder as I Wander, as well as translating several works of literature into English. With Bontemps, Hughes co-edited the 1949 anthologyThe Poetry of the Negro, described byThe New York Times as "a stimulating cross-section of the imaginative writing of the Negro" that demonstrates "talent to the point where one questions the necessity (other than for its social evidence) of the specialization of 'Negro' in the title".[69]
From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Hughes's popularity among the younger generation of black writers varied even as his reputation increased worldwide. With the gradual advance towardracial integration, many black writers considered his writings of black pride and its corresponding subject matter out of date. They considered him a racial chauvinist.[70] He found some new writers, among themJames Baldwin, lacking in such pride, over-intellectual in their work, and occasionally vulgar.[71][72][73]
Hughes wanted young black writers to be objective about their race, but not to scorn it or flee it.[55] He understood the main points of theBlack Power movement of the 1960s, but believed that some of the younger black writers who supported it were too angry in their work. Hughes's workPanther and the Lash, posthumously published in 1967, was intended to show solidarity with these writers, but with more skill and devoid of the most virulent anger and racial chauvinism some showed toward whites.[74][75] Hughes continued to have admirers among the larger younger generation of black writers. He often helped writers by offering advice and introducing them to other influential persons in the literature and publishing communities. This latter group, includingAlice Walker, whom Hughes discovered, looked upon Hughes as a hero and an example to be emulated within their own work. One of these young black writers (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 amthe Negro writer,' but only 'I ama Negro writer.' He never stopped thinking about the rest of us.[76]
Political views
Hughes was drawn toCommunism as an alternative to asegregated America.[77] Many of his lesser-known political writings have been collected in two volumes published by theUniversity of Missouri Press and reflect his attraction to Communism. An example is the poem "A New Song".[78][original research?]
In 1932, Hughes became part of a group of black people who went to theSoviet Union to make a film depicting the plight of African Americans in the United States. Hughes was hired to write the English dialogue for the film. 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. While there, he metRobert Robinson, an African American living inMoscow and unable to leave. InTurkmenistan, Hughes met and befriended the Hungarian authorArthur Koestler, then a Communist who was given permission to travel there.[79]
As later noted in Koestler's autobiography, Hughes, together with some forty other Black Americans, had originally been invited to the Soviet Union to produce a Soviet film on "Negro Life",[80] but the Soviets dropped the film idea because of their 1933 success in getting the US to recognize the Soviet Union and establish an embassy in Moscow. This entailed a toning down of Soviet propaganda on racial segregation in America. Hughes and his fellow Blacks were not informed of the reasons for the cancellation, but he and Koestler worked it out for themselves.[81]
Hughes also managed to travel to China,[82] Japan,[83] and Korea[84] before returning to the States.
Hughes's poetry was frequently published in theCPUSA newspaper and he was involved in initiatives supported by Communist organizations, such as the drive to free theScottsboro Boys. Partly as a show of support for theRepublican faction during theSpanish Civil War,[85] in 1937 Hughes traveled to Spain[86] as a correspondent for theBaltimore Afro-American and other various African-American newspapers. In August 1937, he broadcast live from Madrid alongsideHarry Haywood andWalter Benjamin Garland. When Hughes was in Spain a Spanish Republican cultural magazine,El Mono Azul, featured Spanish translations of his poems.[85] On 29 August 1937, Hughes wrote a poem titledRoar, China! which called for China's resistance to thefull-scale invasion which Japan had launched less than two months earlier.[87]: 237 Hughes used China as ametonym for the "global colour line."[88] According to academic Gao Yunxiang, Hughes's poem was integral to the global circulation ofRoar, China! as an artistic theme.[87]: 237 In November 1937, Hughes departed Spain for whichEl Mono Azul published a brief farewell message entitled "el gran poeta de raza negra" ("the great poet of the black race").[85]
Hughes initially did not favor black American involvement in the war because of the persistence of discriminatory U.S.Jim Crow 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 forcivil rights at home.[90] The scholarAnthony Pinn has noted that Hughes, together withLorraine Hansberry andRichard Wright, was a humanist "critical of belief in God. They provided a foundation for nontheistic participation in social struggle." Pinn has found that such writers are sometimes ignored in the narrative of American history that chiefly credits the civil rights movement to the work of affiliated Christian people.[91] During World War II, Hughes became a proponent of theDouble V campaign; the double Vs referred to victory over Hitler abroad and victory over Jim Crow domestically.[87]: 276
Hughes was accused of being a Communist by many on the political right, but he always denied it. When asked why he never joined the Communist Party, he wrote, "it was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept." In 1953, he was called before theSenate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by SenatorJoseph McCarthy. He stated, "I never read the theoretical books of socialism or communism or the Democratic or Republican parties for that matter, and so my interest in whatever may be considered political has been non-theoretical, non-sectarian, and largely emotional and born out of my own need to find some way of thinking about this whole problem of myself."[92] Following his testimony, Hughes distanced himself from Communism.[93] He was rebuked by some on the radical left who had previously supported him. He moved away from overtly political poems and towards more lyric subjects. When selecting his poetry for hisSelected Poems (1959) he excluded all his radical socialist verse from the 1930s.[93] These critics on the Left were unaware of the secret interrogation that took place days before the televised hearing.[94][original research?]
Death
On May 22, 1967, Hughes died in theStuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City at the age of 66 from complications after abdominal surgery related toprostate cancer. His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the foyer of theSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.[95] It is the entrance to an auditorium named for him.[96] The design on the floor is an Africancosmogram entitledRivers. The title is taken from his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". Within the center of the cosmogram is the line: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers".
Representation in other media
The poem "Danse Africaine" on a wall of the building at theNieuwe Rijn [nl] 46,Leiden, Netherlands
Harry Burleigh set the poem "Lovely, dark, and lonely one" from the 1932 collectionThe Dream Keeper and Other Poems[97] to music in 1935,[98] his lastart song. Italian composerMira Sulpizi set Hughes's text to music in her 1968 song "Lyrics".[99]
Hughes's life has been portrayed in film and stage productions since the late 20th century. InLooking for Langston (1989), British filmmakerIsaac Julien claimed him as a black gay icon—Julien thought that Hughes's sexuality had historically been ignored or downplayed. Film portrayals of Hughes includeGary LeRoi Gray's role as a teenage Hughes in the short subject filmSalvation (2003) (based on a portion of his autobiographyThe Big Sea), andDaniel Sunjata as Hughes in theBrother to Brother (2004).Hughes' Dream Harlem, a documentary byJamal Joseph, examines Hughes's works and environment.
Paper Armor (1999) by Eisa Davis andHannibal of the Alps (2005)[100] by Michael Dinwiddie are plays by African-American playwrights that address Hughes's sexuality.Spike Lee's 1996 filmGet on the Bus, included a black gay character, played byIsaiah Washington, who invokes the name of Hughes and punches a homophobic character, saying: "This is for James Baldwin and Langston Hughes."
Hughes'sAsk Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, written in 1960, was performed for the first time in March 2009 with specially composed music byLaura Karpman atCarnegie Hall, at theHonor festival curated byJessye Norman in celebration of the African-American cultural legacy.[102]Ask Your Mama is the centerpiece of "The Langston Hughes Project",[103] a multimedia concert performance directed by Ron McCurdy, professor of music in theThornton School of Music at theUniversity of Southern California.[104] The European premiere of The Langston Hughes Project, featuringIce-T and McCurdy, took place at theBarbican Centre,London, on November 21, 2015, as part of theLondon Jazz Festival mounted by music producers Serious.[105][106]
The novelHarlem Mosaics (2012) by Whit Frazier depicts the friendship between Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and tells the story of how their friendship fell apart during their collaboration on the playMule Bone.[107]
On September 22, 2016, his poem "I, Too" was printed on a full page ofThe New York Times in response to the riots of the previous day in Charlotte, North Carolina.[108]
^West,Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, 2003, p. 160.
^Hughes recalled his maternal grandmother's stories: "Through my grandmother's stories life always moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, schemed, or fought. But no crying." Rampersad, Arnold, & David Roessel (2002).The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Knopf, p. 620.
^The poem "Aunt Sues's Stories" (1921) is an oblique tribute to his grandmother and his loving "Auntie" Mary Reed, a close family friend. Rampersad, vol. 1, 1986, p. 43.
^Central High School (Cleveland, Ohio); Wirth, Thomas H.; Hughes, Langston; Thomas H. Wirth Collection (Emory University. MARBL) (February 1, 2019)."The Central High School monthly". Central High. RetrievedFebruary 1, 2019 – via Hathi Trust.
^Brooks, Gwendolyn (October 12, 1986)."Review ofThe Darker Brother".The New York Times.And the father, Hughes said, 'hated Negroes. I think he hated himself, too, for being a Negro. He disliked all of his family because they were Negroes.' James Hughes was tightfisted, uncharitable, cold.
^"Poem" or "To F.S." first appeared inThe Crisis in May 1925 and was reprinted inThe Weary Blues andThe Dream Keeper. Hughes never publicly identified "F.S.", but it is conjectured he wasFerdinand Smith, a merchant seaman whom the poet first met in New York in the early 1920s. Nine years older than Hughes, Smith influenced the poet to go to sea. Born inJamaica in 1893, Smith spent most of his life as a ship steward and political activist at sea—and later in New York as a resident of Harlem. Smith was deported in 1951 to Jamaica for alleged Communist activities and illegal alien status. Hughes corresponded with Smith up until the latter's death in 1961. Berry, p. 347.
^"Cafe 3 A.M." was against gay bashing by police, and "Poem for F.S." was about his friend Ferdinand Smith (Nero 1999, p. 500).
^Jean Blackwell Hutson, former chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, said: "He was always eluding marriage. He said marriage and career didn't work. ... It wasn't until his later years that I became convinced he was homosexual." Hutson & Nelson,Essence, February 1992, p. 96.
^McClatchy, J. D. (2002).Langston Hughes: Voice of the Poet. New York: Random House Audio. p. 12.ISBN978-0553714913.Though there were infrequent and half-hearted affairs with women, most people considered Hughes asexual, insistent on a skittish, carefree 'innocence.' In fact, he was a closeted homosexual.
^Sandra West states: Hughes's "apparent love for black men as evidenced through a series of unpublished poems he wrote to a black male lover named 'Beauty'." West, 2003, p. 162.
^"His fatalism was well placed. Under such pressure, Hughes's sexual desire, such as it was, became not so much sublimated as vaporized. He governed his sexual desires to an extent rare in a normal adult male; whether his appetite was normal and adult is impossible to say. He understood, however, that Cullen and Locke offered him nothing he wanted, or nothing that promised much for him or his poetry. If certain of his responses to Locke seemed like teasing (a habit Hughes would never quite lose with women, or, perhaps, men) they were not therefore necessarily signs of sexual desire; more likely, they showed the lack of it. Nor should one infer quickly that Hughes was held back by a greater fear of public exposure as a homosexual than his friends had; of the three men, he was the only one ready, indeed eager, to be perceived as disreputable." "Rampersad,The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I, p. 69.
^Referring to men of African descent, Rampersad writes: "... Hughes found some young men, especially dark-skinned men, appealing and sexually fascinating. (Both in his various artistic representations, in fiction especially, and in his life, he appears to have found young white men of little sexual appeal.) Virile young men of very dark complexion fascinated him." Rampersad, vol. 2, 1988, p. 336.
^"The Negro Speaks of Rivers": first published inThe Crisis (June 1921), p. 17. Included inThe New Negro (1925),The Weary Blues,Langston Hughes Reader, andSelected Poems. The poem is dedicated to W. E. B. Du Bois inThe Weary Blues, but it is printed without dedication in later versions. – Rampersad & Roessel (2002). InThe Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, pp. 23, 620.
^Rampersad & Roessel (2002),The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, pp. 23, 620.
^Hughes "disdained the rigid class and color differences the 'best people' drew between themselves and Afro-Americans of darker complexion, of smaller means and lesser formal education." – Berry, 1983 & 1992, p. 60.
^"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (June 1926),The Nation.
^"My People" First published as "Poem" inThe Crisis (October 1923), p. 162, andThe Weary Blues (1926). The title poem "My People" was collected inThe Dream Keeper (1932) and theSelected Poems of Langston Hughes (1959). Rampersad & Roessel (2002),The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, pp. 36, 623.
^Mercer Cook, African-American scholar of French culture wrote: "His (Langston Hughes) work had a lot to do with the famous concept ofNégritude, of black soul and feeling, that they were beginning to develop." Rampersad, vol. 1, 1986, p. 343.
^Charlotte Mason generously supported Hughes for two years. She supervised his writing his first novel,Not Without Laughter (1930). Her patronage of Hughes ended about the time the novel appeared. Rampersad. "Langston Hughes", inThe Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, 2001, p. 207.
^ab"Langston Hughes".Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. Chicago Writers Association. Archived fromthe original on September 8, 2013. RetrievedJune 11, 2013.
^Langston's misgivings about the new black writing were because of its emphasis on black criminality and frequent use of profanity. – Rampersad, vol. 2, p. 207.
^Hughes said: "There are millions of blacks who never murder anyone, or rape or get raped or want to rape, who never lust after white bodies, or cringe before white stupidity, or Uncle Tom, or go crazy with race, or off-balance with frustration." – Rampersad, vol. 2, p. 119.
^Langston eagerly looked to the day when the gifted young writers of his race would go beyond the clamor of civil rights and integration and take a genuine pride in being black ... he found this latter quality starkly absent in even the best of them. – Rampersad, vol. 2, p. 310.
^"As for whites in general, Hughes did not like them ... He felt he had been exploited and humiliated by them." – Rampersad, 1988, vol. 2, p. 338.
^Hughes's advice on how to deal with racists was,"'Always be polite to them ... be over-polite. Kill them with kindness.' But, he insisted on recognizing that all whites are not racist, and definitely enjoyed the company of those who sought him out in friendship and with respect." – Rampersad, 1988, vol. 2, p. 368.
^Fountain, James (June 2009). "The notion of crusade in British and American literary responses to the Spanish Civil War".Journal of Transatlantic Studies.7 (2):133–147.doi:10.1080/14794010902868298.S2CID145749786.
^The end of "A New Song" was substantially changed when it was included inA New Song (New York: International Workers Order, 1938).
^Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, Volume 2, Volume 107, Issue 84 of S. prt, Beth Bolling,ISBN978-0160513626. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Publisher: U.S. GPO. Original from the University of Michiganp. 988.Archived March 10, 2015, at theWayback Machine
^abLeach,Langston Hughes: A Biography (2004), pp. 118–119.
^Sharf, James C. (1981).Testimony of Richard T. Seymour, before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Senate Committee on the Judiciary.doi:10.1037/e578982009-004.[full citation needed]
^Wilson, Scott (2016).Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons. Jefferson, North Carolina:McFarland & Company. p. 359.ISBN978-0786479924.
^Whitaker, Charles, "Langston Hughes: 100th birthday celebration of the poet of Black America",Ebony, April 2002.
^"Song".The Dream Keeper and Other Poems. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, vol. 11. University of Missouri Press. 2001. p. 65.ISBN9780826214980.
^"Langston Hughes, Poet".Los Angeles Times. September 26, 1926. p. 66. RetrievedJanuary 7, 2021 – vianewspapers.com.The Witter Bynner undergraduate poetry prize for 1926 was awarded to Langston Hughes, Lincoln University, whom Carl Van Vechten ranks with among the best of the younger American poets.
^"Langston Hughes – Poet". h2g2: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. April 14, 2008. RetrievedJuly 24, 2010.
^"Medallion Recipients".The City College of New YOrk. July 4, 2015. RetrievedJanuary 5, 2024.
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Nero, Charles I. (1997). "Re/Membering Langston: Homphobic Textuality and Arnold Rampersad's Life of Langston Hughes". InMartin Duberman (ed.).Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures. New York University Press.ISBN0814718841.
Nero, Charles I. (1999). "Free Speech or Hate Speech: Pornography and its Means of Production". In Larry P. Gross; James D. Woods (eds.).Columbia Reader on Lesbians and Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics. Columbia University Press.ISBN0231104472.
Nichols, Charles H. (1980).Arna Bontempts-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925–1967. Dodd, Mead & Company.ISBN0396076874.
Ostrom, Hans (2002).A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia, Westport: Greenwood Press.ISBN0313303924.
Rampersad, Arnold (1986).The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 1: I, Too, Sing America. Oxford University Press.ISBN0195146425
Rampersad, Arnold (1988).The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 2: I Dream a World. Oxford University Press.ISBN0195146433.
Schwarz, Christa A. B. (2003). "Langston Hughes: A True 'People's Poet'".Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Indiana University Press.ISBN0253216079.
West, Sandra L. (2003). "Langston Hughes". In Aberjhani & Sandra West (eds.).Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Checkmark Press. p. 162.ISBN0816045402.
Baldwin, James, and Clayton Riley,"James Baldwin on Langston Hughes",The Langston Hughes Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter 1997), pp. 125–137. Langston Hughes Society: Penn state University Press.
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