DIVISION OF RADIO AND TV
THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF THE
PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH
PUBLIC SERVICE PROGRAM FOR
THIS STATION

Dec. 1960
DATE STATION

VIEWPOINT

Guest: Mr. Langston Hughes
Moderator: The Rev. Dana F. Kennedy

Mr. Kennedy: Your name please?

Mr. Hughes: Langston Hughes.

Mr. Kennedy: And your occupation?

Mr. Hughes: Author -- primarily (in the eyes of the public, at least) a poet.

Mr. Kennedy: Mr. Hughes, do you think that Americans appreciate poets?

Mr. Hughes: My viewpoint is that they do if poetry is brought directly to the people in a simple fashion. I do not believe that we have the same appreciation for poetry in our country that we find in Latin America or in most of Europe. But I know from many years of reading my poems in public, that when poetry is brought directly to the people, they listen to it with interest, they appreciate it and they buy the book.

ANNOUNCER: This is VIEWPOINT, an unrehearsed and personal interview with another distinguished and well-known personality who will reveal to you, the American public, what he holds to be the responsibilities of his position in American life, produced by the Episcopal Church and brought to you as a public service by this Station. Mr. Kennedy's guest today is Langston Hughes, known as the poet laureate of the Negro people. His works include the successful stage and television musical, "Simply Heavenly." Here is the Moderator of the award-winning series, VIEWPOINT, The Rev. Dana F. Kennedy, Executive Secretary, Division of Radio and Television for the National Council of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Mr. Kennedy.

Mr. Kennedy: Welcome to Viewpoint, Mr. Hughes. What inspired you to get into the matter of writing poetry?

Mr. Hughes: Well, I can't really say that I was inspired. It came about through a kind of accident. I was in the eighth grade in Lincoln, Illinois, a new student in the class, and the day before they were holding the class elections. And they had nominated the various officers, President, Secretary-Treasurer and so on, but there were no nominations for class poet on the day of the elections. The day before, the teacher had stressed rhythm. Well, when they got onto class poets on the day of the election, no

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Mr. Hughes: nominations. Everybody looked around at each other, didn't see anybody who even looked like a poet, I was a strange boy in the class, one of the two Negro pupils there. Finally a little white boy got up and nominated me, and the whole class said "Aye" unanimously, and that's the way I became a poet.

Mr. Kennedy: Well, that's most interesting. I was intrigued, too. You said there was no one there that looked like a poet. Is a poet supposed to look a certain way?

Mr. Hughes: Well, I think people have sort of a conventional idea that anyone who writes poetry is liable to look like what we think of nowadays as Beatnicks, or at least have long hair. But that's not true at all.

Mr. Kennedy: What is the special talent that makes a man or woman a poet?

Mr. Hughes: Well, a quality of rhythm in one's sensitivity in the use of words, I would say, and I think that's what caused the students to elect me that day because the teacher said, "a poem has got to have rhythm." And, in stressing rhythm, you know there's a kind of conventional belief in our country that all Negroes have a sense of rhythm, because we can sing and dance, which is not a hundred percent true either, but my little white classmates, I suppose, connecting up poetry-rhythm, looking around seeing me, picked me out, otherwise, I'll never know exactly why they did. I'm glad they did. I'm glad I became the class poet in the eighth grade in Lincoln, Illinois, because that started my writing career.

Mr. Kennedy: Well, in addition to rhythm, is there something else that makes a person a good poet?

Mr. Hughes: I would think that one needs a very deep sensitivity to the problems of the average human being. I think perhaps one reason contemporary poetry is not held in too high repute in our country, or not too widely read, is that it is so often too very personal, just about the poet's own problems. I think the great poets, American and otherwise, Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, have been poets whose sensitivity extended over a very wide area, and whose poems encompassed the emotions and problems of many people, not just themselves personally, you know?

Mr. Kennedy: Well, isn't the problem of any special person apt to be the common problem of all of his brothers?

Mr. Hughes: It is if it is a basic problem. But some modern poets, for example, will write a poem in which they will mention, say, the Charles River and the Oleander Bush, and the

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Mr. Hughes: rocking chair, and if you don't know it's the river of their childhood, if you don't know the Oleander Bush is one beside the door they used to play, the symbolism and the implications are so personal, oftimes that they don't reach a broad audience. Do you see what I mean? Whereas, in Sandburg's poems, by and large, that's not true. The poems about the wheat fields, about Chicago, about the steel mills are poems in which a great many people can identify with something in them. You see? Yes, you're quite right. A personal problem can be, maybe a problem of a great many people, but when it's expressed too personally, it doesn't carry over to others.

Mr. Kennedy: When you go about writing a poem, do you sit down and say, "Now I'll write a poem?"

Mr. Hughes: No, I don't. I think some poets do. All writers work differently and poets who work in the formal forms like the sonnet, for example, or the rondeau, work their forms, work out their subject matter, sometimes, and mold the two together. I am the kind of poet that writes largely by ear, I think. Whatever thought comes into my mind that I wish to put down -- usually it comes in the form of a line or two -- like one of my poems "I've known rivers/ I've known rivers ancient as the world." Well, that thought came to me in those lines. And then I extended it by giving it thought and by thinking about it and by a little work.

Mr. Kennedy: Well, what kind of influences shape your work? Where -- let's take the illustration you've just given -- that you've "known rivers as ancient as the world." What sort of things through your life come to a focus when you start writing this poem?

Mr. Hughes: That particular poem came about by childhood memories -- the confusion of getting my grandmother to talk about being sold on the Mississippi in slavery times -- which was one of the worst things that could happen to a Negro -- by hearing a little about Africa in my childhood and the greatness of the African kingdoms in ancient Africa. I was on a train going to Mexico where my father lived after I graduated from high school, and the train went across the Mississippi River just outside St. Louis, and it was evening time -- dusk. Looking out the window at this great muddy river flowing down toward the heart of the South I thought about these things I've just said, and sort of personalizing it all, making myself the "I" for the Negro people -- the lines came "I've known rivers...". Most of my poems are short. This one is not more than twelve lines. So I put it down on the back of my father's letter I had in my pocket -- and it was written perhaps in ten or fifteen minutes.

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Mr. Kennedy: Mr. Hughes, do you find that religious faith of any kind influences your work?

Mr. Hughes: Yes, I would think very much so. I grew up in a not very religious family, but I had a foster aunt who saw that I went to church and Sunday school quite a deal in my childhood, and I was very much moved, always, by the, shall I say, the rhythms of the Negro church, the rhythms of the spirituals, the rhythms of those wonderful old time sermons that they used to preach in sort of poetic intonation, you know? And when I began to write poetry, that influence came through in, oh, quite a number of my poems. For example, in my book "The Dream Keeper" I have a section called "Feet of Jesus." And this is one of the poems:

"At the feet of Jesus/ Sorrow like a sea/ Oh, Lord,
let your mercy come/ Drifting down on me./ At the
feet of Jesus, at your feet I stand/ Oh, my precious
Jesus, please reach out your hand."

That particular one has been set to music and sung by
Marion Anderson and a number of other singers, and if I
may, I'd like to read one more that I can give you the
exact background for. There was, in this little church
in Lawrence, Kansas, where I grew up, a very old lady
who came to church every Sunday morning dressed very
neatly and very clean, but quaintly, you know, in an old
fashioned shirtwaist with stays up under her chin and
dressed with wide ruffles around the bottom. Sometimes
some of the younger people in the church were inlcined to
laugh and giggle a little bit when this old lady came
down the aisle. One day someone must have said something
that she overheard that hurt her feelings, because she
turned around right in the middle of the church aisle and
looked at the group of young people and she says, "That's
all right," she said, "You all can be stuck up if you
wan'a, laugh at me if you wan'a, but my Lord ain't stuck
up." And with that she turned around and went back to
her seat in the amen corner. Well, that line "My Lord
ain't stuck up" remained in my head many years. It later
came in a poem called "My Lord".

"My Lord ain't no stuck up man/ My Lord, He ain't
proud? When He goes awalking, He gives me His hand/
'You my friend' He allows, / My Lord knows what it
is to work./ He knows how to pray./ My Lord's life
was troubled too--/ Trouble every day./ My Lord
ain't no stuck up man./ He's a friend of mine./
When He went to heaven, His soul on fire -- He told
me I was go wyne./ He said: 'Sure you'll come with
me/ And by my friend through eternity."

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Mr. Kennedy: That's very lovely. Do you find that in your poems you try to convey a message?

Mr. Hughes: Oh, I think most of the time I do. This particular poem, I suppose subconsciously I was trying to say that when religion places itself at the service of mankind, particularly the humble people, it can give them something to help sustain them and strengthen them and guide them, and I'm a great believer in the social aspect of religion.

Me. Kennedy: You don't confine religion to being a mystical experience which you enjoy all by yourself then?

Mr. Hughes: Oh, I'm not inclined to feel that way myself. There's great beauty in the mysticism of much religious writing, and great help there -- but I also think that we live in a world which is a world of solid earth and vegetables and a need for jobs and a need for housing, and I think you can't detach the two, really.

Mr. Kennedy: Do you feel that the Negro people have had full opportunity to grow to their greatest extent here in this country?

Mr. Hughes: Oh, No, I don't. I couldn't possibly feel that. I'm sure you don't either.

Mr. Kennedy: No, I asked the question because I wanted your feelings about it.

Mr. Hughes: I'm sure that everyone knows that our country and South Africa have been the two parts of the world, in relation to colored people, who have had the most stringent segregation. And even yet, big beautiful million dollar schools are kept closed. White and Negro children, nobody goes to school. Simply because they don't want a few colored kids to sit in the same classroom with the whites. And you read right now, it's worth a Negro's life to try to vote in some parts of the South. I know we haven't had an equal opportunity here, and I, what do you call those kind of questions, rhetorical questions, don't you?

Mr. Kennedy: Yes, but I think a truth has to be said again and again. Even so. Are you, Mr. Hughes, optimistic or pessimistic about the progress we're making for equality in this country?

Mr. Hughes: I'm optimistic, because there's been very definite progress within the last ten or fifteen years, particularly since the war. In fact, some very great strides in certain fields.

Mr. Kennedy: Why, in a city like New York do most of the Negro celebrities forsake Harlem as soon as they can and go somewhere else to live?

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Mr. Hughes: Well, a great many do so, just as most (I wouldn't say most whites) just as many whites in the celebrity class move to Westchester, move to Long Island, or someplace. The same thing is true of those Negro's who are successful financially.

Mr. Kennedy: Thank you very much, Mr. Langston Hughes, for being with us and for giving us your viewpoint.

ANNOUNCER: This has been VIEWPOINT, an unrehearsed and personal interview with another distinguished and well-known personality, produced as a public service by the Division of Radio and Television for the Protestant Episcopal Church. Today's guest was Langston Hughes, known as the poet laureate of the Negro people. His works include the successful stage and television musical, "Simply Heavenly". If you wish a copy of this interview, please drop a post card with your name and address and the person interviewed, to VIEWPOINT, 281 Park Avenue South, New York 10, New York. Next week the Rev. Dana F. Kennedy will have as his guest, Dr. Margaret Mead, Anthropologist, Author and Curator for the Museum of Natural History in New York City. This program has been selected by the Armed Forces Radio Network for broadcast to our Armed Forces overseas. This is Bill Shipley speaking.

NOTE:

Minimum editing has been done on this script from the broadcast tape. No part of this script may be quoted in broadcast or printed form without written permission from the Division of Radio and Television of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

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VIEWPOINT

Mr. Hughes: Langston Hughes.

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"My Lord ain't no stuck up man/ My Lord, He ain't proud? When He goes awalking, He gives me His hand/ 'You my friend' He allows,./ My Lord knows what it is to work./ He knows how to pray./ My Lord's life was troubled too--/ Trouble every day./ My Lord ain't no stuck up man./ He's a friend of mine./ When He went to heaven, His soul on fire -- He told me I was go wyne./ He said: 'Sure you'll come with me/ And by my friend through eternity.'"

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NOTE: