Langston Hughes

## Biography

LAKGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967) was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Not only was he an important poet, he also helped many other black writers to get their works published.

An influential cultural organizer, Hughes published numerous black anthologies and began black theater groups in Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as New York City. He also wrote effective journalism, creating the character Jesse B. Semple (“simple”) to express social commentary. One of his most beloved poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921, 1925), embraces his African — and universal — heritage in a grand epic catalogue. The poem suggests that, like the great rivers of the world, African culture will endure and deepen.

* Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. A child of mixed-race parents.
* He grew up in Kansas and began writing poetry in high school, for the school magazine.
* Went to Columbia University but dropeed out after his freshman year.
* 1923: He took a job as a cabin boy on a boat bound to Africa.
* 1926: Published *The Weary Blues* with the help of Vachel Lindsay.
* 1927: Charlotte Mason became his literary patron, providing financial support.
* 1934: Published *The Ways of White Folks*
* 1938: Founded the Harlem Suitcase Theater in New York.
* 1948: Moved to Harlem.
* 1951: Published *Montage of a Dream Deferred*.
* 1967: Died at age 65.

## Historical & Cultural Context

### The Great Migration

One of the most important themes in twentieth-century American history is the struggle of black Americans for their human and social rights. In 1863 , during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln had ended the slavery of blacks. But their position in American society remained very bad . In the South especially, government laws were used to keep black Americans in a low social position. There was also a powerful organization called the Ku Klux Klan which often used violence against blacks. Around the Turn of the Century, large numbers of blacks began moving from the South to the cities of the North. In such cities as New York, their situation was somewhat better. In the North, young black artists and writers began their long struggle for social justice for their people.

The Great Migration was one of the largest movements of people in United States history. Approximately six million Black people moved from the American South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states roughly from the 1910s until the 1970s. The driving force behind the mass movement was to escape racial violence, pursue economic and educational opportunities, and obtain freedom from the oppression of Jim Crow.

The First Great Migration (1910-1940) had Black southerners relocate to northern and midwestern cities including: New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. When the war effort ramped up in 1917, more able bodied men were sent off to Europe to fight leaving their industrial jobs vacant. The labor supply was further strained with a decline in immigration from Europe and standing bans on peoples of color from other parts of the world. All of this afforded the opportunity for the Black population to be the labor supply in non-agricultural industries.

Although the migrants found better jobs and fled the South entrenched in Jim Crow, many African Americans faced injustices and difficulties after migrating. The Red Summer of 1919 was rooted in tensions and prejudice that arose from white people having to adjust to the demographic changes in their local communities.

The Red Summer was a pattern of white-on-black violence that occurred in 1919 throughout the United States. The post World War I period was marked by a spike in racial violence, much of it directed toward African American veterans returning from Europe, where they were often treated much better there than by white Americans, despite their brave service to the country. The bloodiest incident occurred in Elaine, Arkansas, where it is estimated that over 100 African Americans were killed. The racial violence of the Red Summer erupted in many other Southern locations as well as in the North, most notably in Chicago. The presence of racial hostility in the North was partly a reaction of Northern whites to the large influx of African Americans into Northern cities during the Great Migration, though this hostility did not prevent large numbers of African Americans from heading North.

Black people who migrated during the second phase of the Great Migration were met with housing discrimination, as localities had started to implement restrictive covenants and redlining, which created segregated neighborhoods, but also served as a foundation for the existing racial disparities in wealth in the United States.

### The Roaring 20s

New farm machines such as planters, harvesters, and binders had drastically reduced the demand for farm jobs; yet despite their increased productivity, farmers were poor. Crop prices, like urban workers’ wages, depended on unrestrained market forces heavily influenced by business interests: Government subsidies for farmers and effective workers’ unions had not yet become established. “The chief business of the American people is business,” President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed in 1925, and most agreed.

In the postwar “Big Boom,” business flourished, and the successful prospered beyond their wildest dreams. For the first time, many Americans enrolled in higher education — in the 1920s college enrollment doubled. The middleclass prospered; Americans began to enjoy the world’s highest national average income in this era, and many people purchased the ultimate status symbol — an automobile. The typical urban American home glowed with electric lights and boasted a radio that connected the house with the outside world, and perhaps a telephone, a camera, a typewriter, or a sewing machine.

Americans of the “Roaring Twenties” fell in love with other modern entertainments. Most people went to the movies once a week. Although Prohibition — a nationwide ban on the production, transport, and sale of alcohol instituted through the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — began in 1919, underground “speak-easies” and nightclubs proliferated, featuring jazz music, cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance. Dancing, moviegoing, automobile touring, and radio were national crazes.

American women, in particular, felt liberated. Many had left farms and villages for homefront duty in American cities during World War I, and had become resolutely modern. They cut their hair short (“bobbed”), wore short “flapper” dresses, and gloried in the right to vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1920. They boldly spoke their mind and took public roles in society.

### The Harlem Renaissance

The era of the 1920s is often called the Jazz Age . Jazz, a musical form created by Southern blacks, became an important part of white culture at this time. For the first time, the names of black musicians and black writers became famous among all Americans. In Harlem, a northern part of New York City, black writers began the "Harlem Renaissance." The writers in this movement were influenced by the experimental styles of European and American literature. They tried using these forms to talk about the experience of black people in
American society. The best writers in the Harlem Renaissance were able to create works of high artistic quality.

Harlem, the black community situated uptown in New York City, sparkled with passion and creativity. The sounds of its black American jazz swept the United States by storm, and jazz musicians and composers like Duke Ellington became stars beloved across the United States and overseas. Bessie Smith and other blues singers presented frank, sensual, wry lyrics raw with emotion. Black spirituals became widely appreciated as uniquely beautiful religious music. Ethel Waters, the black actress, triumphed on the stage, and black American dance and art flourished with music and drama.

## Bibliography

* *The Weary Blues* (1926)
* *The Ways of White Folks* (1934)
* *The Big Sea* (1940) Autobiography
* *Montage of a Dream Deferred* (1951)

### The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

In this essay, Hughes criticizes other black writers for being too interested in white culture and white forms.

"I am ashamed for the black poet who says, "I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet," as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world. I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians because he fears the strange unwhiteness of his own features. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose."

### Literary Style

He embraced African-American jazz rhythms and was one of the first black writers to attempt to make a profitable career out of his writing. Hughes incorporated blues, spirituals, colloquial speech, and folkways in his poetry.

Hughes aimed to write in accessible, familiar language, influenced by Whitman, among others, who wrote in vernacular, everyday language in the hopes that their work could appeal to a larger audience.

In his 1927 essay, he wrote that classical forms did not support the work he wanted to do: "Certainly the Shakespearean sonnet would be no mold in which to express the life of Beale Street or Lenox Avenue, nor could the emotions of State Street be captured in rondeau. I am not interested in doing tricks with rhymes, I am interested in reproducing the human soul, if I can."

He brilliantly combines formal poetry with the oral tradition and refuses to draw a line between fine art and folk art.

**Common Themes:**

* The exploration of racism and African American identity
* Injustice, inequality and segregation
* What it meant to be balck and an American
* Color prejudice (colorism)

#### Double Consciousness

Literature of the Harlem Renaissance often discussed the so-called *double consciousness* of the African American experience.

First explored by W.E.B. Du Bois in *The Souls of Black Folk* in 1903:

"The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, – a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength along keeps it from being torn asunder."

* The veil: the color line that separates blacks from whites.
* The second sight: A "gift" of seeing themselves through the revelation of the other world forces black people to contend with their constant dehumanization and at the same time they can glance into the white world and neutralize the mirroring effects of the veil.
* The two-ness: Within a process of self-realization, the the racialized takes the position of the two worlds, the one created behind the veil, and the world which dehumanizes the first through lack of recognition.

## Works

### The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921)

The poem begins with the speaker stating that he knows rivers very well. There are a few in particular he wants to share with the reader. All of them are among the largest and longest of the planet. They were also host to some of the most important historical events and civilizations. The poem concludes with a repetition of the opening lines, making sure a reader is aware of the speaker’s deep connection to the bodies of water.

The poem celebrates the strength of Black heritage and perseverance, and it suggests that, like the great rivers of the world, African culture will endure and deepen.

Lyric mode (poetry trying to capture an internal emotional state.

The repetition gives the feeling of a sermon (use of folk form)

1. I've known rivers:

2. I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

3. flow of human blood in human rivers

4. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

5. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young

6. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

7. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

8. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

9. went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy

10. bosom turn all golden in the sunset

11. I've known rivers:

12. Ancient, dusky rivers.

13. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

### I, too, sing America (1926)

A response to Walt Whitman’s "I Hear America Singing" (1860)

Main idea: Black people are as part of America as whites.

Possible context: black rights in domestic works

**Symbols:**

* Company, they: whites
* Universal I: representing black people

Deliberate choice of words and tenses to suggest strength and determination

* **“I’ll be at the table”** - the speaker ensures that his position will change, he will be recognized
* **“When the company comes”** (enjambment)
* **“They’ll see how beautiful I am"** - The speaker ensures that Black identity will be praised. This may be due to the influence of the harlem renaissance
* **"and be ashamed”** - they(white people) will be ashamed of discriminating, they will feel remorse
* **“I, too, am America”** - The speaker repeats the first line to reinforce the idea that he, as well as the black community, are indeed part of that America

1. I, too, sing America.

2. I am the darker brother.
3. They send me to eat in the kitchen

4. When company comes,

5. But I laugh,

6. And eat well,

7. And grow strong.

8. Tomorrow,

9. I'll eat at the table

10. When company comes.

11. Nobody'll dare

12. Say to me,

13. "Eat in the kitchen,"

14. Then.

15. Besides,

16. They'll see how beautiful I am

17. And be ashames--

18. I, too, am America.

### Passing (1934)

* Genre: fiction (short story) - epistolary format
	+ Writer: Jack, “mulatto” son of a white man and a black woman
	+ Addressee: Jack’s Ma

* Summary: “Passing” is a story told by Jack through a letter to his mother, revealing the complex experience of individuals that can pass as White, despite identifying as Black. After physically passing his mother on the street and being unable to acknowledge her, Jack writes to his mother reflecting on his ability to pass. Jack acknowledges he can achieve a higher level of social and economic status because he is categorized as White by society. Despite these benefits, there are still consequences to this passing. As a member of White society, Jack is unable to share his life with his Black family, his mother, and siblings Gladys and Charlie. The letter closes with Jack detailing his hopes and plans for the future, including moving to a big city, marrying a White woman, buying a house, acknowledging only his White children, and never seeing his family again.

* Title:
	+ literal meaning: Jack passed his ma downtown for the first time without speaking to her.
	+ metaphorical meaning: “passing” from his old life, a life he chooses to forget (black life: black identity) to the new life he wants to live, the one he chooses as a “good” one (white life: white identity).
	+ Related concept: Passing as white, a practice that enables some black people (especially those of mixed ethnicity or a lighter skin complexion) to "pretend" they are white
* Setting: Chicago from 1929 onwards
* Main Characters: Jack- Jack’s Ma-
* Others mentioned: Charlie- Gladys- Jack’s fiancée- the father
* Themes:
	+ The exploration of the African-American identity
	+ The transition from an African-American identity to a white identity
	+ Social and Racial inequality
	+ Internalized Racism
	+ White privilege

### Harlem (Dream Deferred) (1951)

The title and the first question alludes to a biblical reference, the book of Proverbs 13:12: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life”

Dream Deferred: African Americans are free by law and right, yet, inequality is an issue which seems to never end.

Thoughts and perceptions: profound disgust and disillusionment

**Similes and imagery** are used by the speaker as a means for communicating his thoughts and perceptions about the dream deferred

**“Does it stink like rotten meat?** - Can inequality be worse than this?
**"Or crust and sugar over-- / Like a syrupy sweet?”** - or African Americans will eventually be used to segregation,to live comfortable but separate in their own communities with the motto “separate but equal”?

* A version of the American Dream, one denied to African Americans at the time.
* Negative imagery
* One-syllable rhymes
* Resist conventional stanzas: the lack of an iambic rhythm makes it hard to build into a comfortable pace to the reader.
* The rhymes makes it sound harmless, but the rhythm and imagery tell another, much more barbed story
* Political: He is warning that if circumstances don't change, there might be dangerous consequences. It suggests that witholding the equality has real risks and real costs to everyone in a social order.

1. What happens to a dream deferred?

2. Does it dry up

3. Like a raisin in the sun?

4. Or fester like a sore--

5. And then run?

6. Does it stink like rotten meat?

7. Or crust and sugar over--

8. like a syrupy sweet?

9. Maybe it sags

10. like a heavy load.

11. Or does it explode?

## Intro Paragraph

The issues of racism and segregation prevailed in America much after the end of the American Civil War. Job opportunities were limited for black citizens in the southern states due to different factors, one being the violence and injustice suffered during the yars of segregation. Fighting both the social conditions and the economic chaos, many black families moved to the northern states in neighborhoods that soon became the house of a rich mixture of artistic influences and ancestry-rooted customs. This gave birth to the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement led by black artists whose main purpose was the exploration of topics related to their experiences in a complex America. Born in Harlem, this movement prompted the emergence of jazz and blues, influenced pieces that denounced situations of discrimination, celebrated the embracement of African cultures, and questioned the idea of the American identity. One of the main leaders of the Harlem Renaissance was Langston Hughes (1902-1967), a writer, journalist, and social activist who advocated for the rights of his community throughout his art. Hughes’s pieces utilized a simple but powerful language, communicating with frankness his often revolutionary ideas and employing a protesting, unyielding tone. In his free verse poems “The Negro speaks of the River”, and “I too”, Hughes demonstrates his impact on the Harlem Renaissance by reflecting two of the main themes explored by the movement: the weight of the American identity and a celebration of ancestral heritage.

### MLA citation

Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." 1921. *Langston Hughes -poems-*. Poem Hunter, 2004, pp. 42.

Hughes, Langston. "I, Too, Sing America." 1926. *Langston Hughes -poems-*. Poem Hunter, 2004, pp. 28.

Hughes, Langston. "Dream Deferred." 1951. *Langston Hughes -poems-*. Poem Hunter, 2004, pp. 13.

Hughes, Langston. "Passing." *The Ways of White Folks*. Knopf Doubleday, 1934, pp. 51-55.

## Sources

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2  High, Peter B. *An Outline of American Literature*. Longman, 1986.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3  VanSpanckeren, Kathryn. *Outline of American Literature*. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Information Agency, 1994. Print.
3. ↑  https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/migrations/great-migration