Celebrating Langston at 100

By Frank Dexter Brown
SeeingBlack.com Contributing Writer

Born James Mercer Langston Hughes, he became known simply as Langston. For nearly five decades words flowed from his pen, coming in torrents and waves—poetry, drama, novels, history, essays, song, short fiction, autobiography, newspaper columns and librettos. Called the poet-laureate of Harlem, Hughes wrote more than 50 books, contributed to dozens of anthologies, retrospectives, magazines and journals.

It was his self-described mission "to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America." So he traveled the globe, carrying the story of African Americans—our joys and achievements, our artistry, humor, caring; our marginalization, terror and dehumanization. And he connected our plight with those of all of the world's working peoples, especially those Black, Red and Brown.

Born in the small town of Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902, Hughes went from those humble beginnings, to became a man of the world, traveling from his adopted home of Harlem to Africa, Asia, South and Central America, the Caribbean and Europe. And so this month marks the beginning of a global celebration of the 100th year anniversary of the birth of Langston Hughes.

His poem "Dream Deferred," with its opening question, "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?…, is included in most anthologies of great American and world poetry. And his equally revolutionary pieces such as "Question and Answer," which was included in The Panther and the Lash in 1967 the year he died, also challenged racism and injustice:

Durban, Birmingham,
Cape Town, Atlanta,
Johannesburg, Watts,
The earth around
Struggling, fighting,

Dying—for what?

A world to gain.

Groping, hoping,
Waiting—for what?

A world to gain.

Dreams kicked asunder,
why not go under?

There's a world to gain.

But suppose I don't want it,
why take it?

To remake it.

Hughes expressed in letters a class-consciousness and love of humanity unmatched by few others. As reviewer and historian Saunders Redding, wrote in 1973 in the foreword of the little-recognized anthology of Hughes' poetry and prose, Good Morning Revolution: "From the 1920s until his death in 1967, no poet caught with such sharp immediacy and intensity the humor and the pathos, the irony and the humiliation, the beauty and the bitterness of the experience of being Negro in America; and I think it should be added that no one contributed more to the current refunding of Negro folk material and the reshaping of Negro legend. But there is another dimension. Hughes was a revolutionary writer and poet."

Hughes' revolutionary voice was so strong, so biting in presenting the harsh conditions of everyday working folk, especially those Black and others of color, that in 1953 he was called before the so-called "Un-American Committee" led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Hughes, as well as W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson and so many others, was accused of being a communist and communist sympathizer. His passport was taken away, and his ability to earn a living greatly affected.

Over the next decade, Hughes rarely read aloud or allowed his most poignant, passionate, and radical pieces. Dr. Dolan Hubbard, president of the Langston Hughes Society, explains: "These revolutionary writings from leftist journals of the 1930s and 1940s were suppressed as they did not fit his popular image in a right-leaning America following World War II."

Covering Wars, Covering Peace

Dr. Dolan Hubbard edits the new volume, The Collected Works of Langston Hughes.

This period of acknowledgement is marked by the release of The Collected Work of Langston Hughes, an 18-volume series of all of the first-edition pieces written by Hughes, published by Missouri University Press and edited by an editorial board that includes Hubbard. Hubbard says this treatment of the work of an author of African descent is unprecedented, and deserved for the person many regard as America’s most prolific person of letters.

"He is one of our most beloved writers," says Hubbard, also who is chair of the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University. "No where in Black America can you go where he is not quoted. He is everywhere. And he is loved because while one of the world’s greatest thinkers he also was one with the everyday man and woman. He was accessible. He produced a Black aesthetic that downplayed ‘scholarly jargon.’ He brought together the influences of jazz and the blues, and a social consciousness that is often devoid in other writing. And he did this with humor, passion, insight, and a real caring for people, especially Black folk."

Langston Hughes was definitely a world citizen, and numerous cities nationally, from his adopted Harlem-base, to Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore served as one of those places deeply touched by his genius. Hughes had early attachments with the African American press such as The Afro-American Newspapers, for whom he published in 1937 a series of news accounts of the Spanish civil war against fascist forces of Hitler, and Mussolini, in support of the rightwing General Franco. Hughes wrote of the war: "…At midnight, the public radios on many corners began to blare the war news and people gathered in large groups to hear it. Then the café closed, and we went to the hotel. I had just barely gotten to my room and begun to undress when the low extended wail of a siren began, letting us know that fascist planes were coming. They came, we had been told, from Mallorca across the sea at a terrific speed, dropped their bombs, then circled away into the night again.

Quickly, I put on my shirt, passed Guillen’s room, and together we started downstairs. Suddenly all the lights went out in the hotel. We heard people rushing down the stairs in the dark. A few had flashlights with them. Some were visibly frightened. In the lobby a single candle was burning, casting giant like shadows on the walls. In an ever-increasing wail the siren sounded louder and louder, droning its deathly warning. Suddenly it stopped. By then the lobby was full of people, men, women and children, speaking in Spanish, English, French.

In the distance we heard a series of quick explosions.
"Bombs?" I asked.
"No, antiaircraft guns," a man explained.
Everyone became very quiet. Then we heard the guns go off again. …"

Reaching the Shores of Africa

He ran excerpts in the Afro of what served as the release of the first of his autobiographies, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander. It is in the Big Sea when Hughes described his first time seeing Africa, as he shipped-off to the other side of the world as a 19-year-old crewmember on the S.S. Malone, a freighter. Prophetic words indeed from one who was to write throughout his life of African peoples dispersed globally. Consider: "…All those days I was waiting anxiously to see Africa. And finally, when I saw the dust-green hills in the sunlight, something took hold of me inside. My Africa, Motherland of the Negro peoples! And me a Negro! Africa! The Real Thing, to be touched and seen, not merely read about in a book. …The next day we moved on. And father down the coast it was more like the Africa I had dreamed about—wild and lovely, the people dark and beautiful, the palm trees tall, the sun bright, and the rivers deep. The great Africa of my dreams…"

It is also in The Deep Sea that he describes the train ride South to visit his father in Mexico when he was 18, and how when crossing the Mississippi River in the state of Mississippi, he began to consider the historic long-term impact of great waterways on people of African descent: "…I looked out the window of the Pullman at the great muddy river flowing down toward the heart of the South, and I began to think what that river, the Old Mississippi, had meant to Negroes in the past—how to be sold down the river was the worst fate that could overtake a slave in times of bondage. …Then I began to think about other rivers in our past—the Congo, and the Niger, and the Nile in Africa—and the thought came to me: 'I've known Rivers,' and I put it down on the back of an envelope I had in my pocket, and within the space of ten or fifteen minutes, as the train gathered speed in the dusk, I had written the poem, which I called 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers':

I've known rivers:
I've known Rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of
            human blood in human veins.

My Soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when the 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.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

-- February 21, 2002

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