It was a cultural revolution in music, art, theatre, dance, film, books, fashion and politics. It was the Jazz Age - Roaring 20s - and Hughes proudly announced, "The negro is in vogue." Our boy Carl Van Vechten spent the era snapping endless roles of film while penning the not so PC quasi-fictional account of the times, Nigger Heaven..
Langston's life's work revolved around demystifying - sucking all the pretentious air out of - the art form of poetry. He wanted people to know that you shouldn't need a freakin' PhD to enjoy it. You would never have need for cliff notes to decipher his prose - that was a burden for Shakespeare fans. He could have put words to paper with Ivy league ease but instead he chose to use everyday street speak with a strong black dialect. It only makes sense that he gravitated towards poets like the great Paul Laurence Dunbar, the folk art stylings of Carl Sandburg and words for the everyman written by Walt Whitman. They were the sums of the whole that added up to one of poetry's most important innovators.
Hughes was born of mixed race in the once lawless midwest mining town of Joplin, Missouri in 1902. There he remained where he was raised by a grandmother (who was once wed to a member of John Brown's raid party) before reuniting with his natural mother in Kansas at the age of thirteen. There he wrote his first poems. When it came time for college he headed to New York's Columbia University where he studied for one year to pursue a career in engineering which he soon learned held little or no interest to him. He was well travelled visiting Mexico to see his father as a teen before shipping out to Europe and Africa to find himself not long after he gave up his formal studies. He would later return to the neighborhood of Harlem just next door to his former Columbia University campus.
Hi first work was published in 1926, The Weary Blues.
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He was a contributor to the leftist rag, New Masses with it's star studded line-up featuring Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Eugene O'Neill and Ernest Hemingway.
In 1931 he joined a black delegation to Russia to study the Soviet Union where was turned on to the great russian poet Alexander Pushkin. Stalin's Great Purge was still five years away so black Americans like Hughes and Paul Robeson enjoyed their time there unfettered in A Land Where There Is No Jim Crow. Jim Crow law still segregated US troops contrary to what Langston Hughes saw in the spirit of the United States Constitution.
While speaking abroad in Japan in 1933 about the mistreatment of African-Americans he caught the attention of the FBI who kept a dossier on Hughes throughout the rest of his life. Most of the records which are now public failed to get much of anything correct about him. He was never a member of the Communist Party. He never did marry that white woman.
Come WWII, Hoover had informants crawling up Langston's ass. The Bureau seemed obsessed about his poem Goodbye Christ which made it into his FBI file.
Kings, generals, robbers, and killers-
Goodbye,
Go ahead on now,
You’re getting in the way of things, Lord.
Don’t be so slow about movin?
Harlem's East 127th Street has since been renamed Langston Hughes Place.
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