Langston Hughes Facts & Worksheets

• Hughes eventually moved to Mexico and Cuba. His mother moved around a lot for work, so she left Hughes with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. His grandmother taught him to be proud of his race and to fight for justice. 
• These values shaped how he saw the world. After she died, Hughes lived with family friends until he moved back in with his mother, who had got married again. The family first moved to Lincoln, Illinois, and then to Cleveland, Ohio, where Hughes went to Central High School.
• There, with the help of teacher Helen Maria Chesnutt, he became interested in writing. He wrote short stories, plays and poetry for school newspapers. His first jazz poem was When Sue Wears Red. During these early years, he learnt how powerful language can be as a way to express himself.
• Hughes spent time with his father in Mexico after high school, but their relationship was not good. His father wanted him to have a useful job and made him study engineering. They came to an agreement that let Hughes start school at Columbia University in 1921. Hughes did well in school at Columbia and published poetry in the Columbia Daily Spectator, but he left after a year because of racism and being alone.
• But his time in New York City showed him the cultural richness of Harlem, which became a big part of who he was as a writer. Hughes got a job as a crew member on the S.S. Malone in 1923. This let him travel to Europe and West Africa. He lived in Paris for a while, where he got to know the city’s art scene and met Anne Marie Coussey, an African woman who had been educated in Britain.
• Hughes’s travels opened his mind and made him more aware of how race affects people all over the world. Hughes came back to the US in 1924 and moved to Washington, D.C. There, he worked for a short time for historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. He did not like doing clerical work, so he quit and became a hotel busboy. At this time, Hughes met poet Vachel Lindsay by chance, and Lindsay encouraged Hughes’s work. This was Hughes’s first big break.
• The Weary Blues (1926), Hughes’s first book of poetry, made him famous. It had The Negro Speaks of Rivers, a poem that first appeared in The Crisis in 1921 and became one of his most famous works. He also wrote the essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain that year. In it, he said that Black writers should be proud of their culture instead of trying to fit in with white standards. This idea was very important to the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that honoured African-American music, art and literature. Hughes was one of the most important voices in this movement, along with Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman and Claude McKay.
• Hughes went on to get his B.A. from Lincoln University, a historically Black school, in 1929. He also started working with wealthy patron Charlotte Osgood Mason during this time, but their partnership ended because they couldn’t agree on who should have creative control. His first book, Not Without Laughter (1930), won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature, which made him even more famous as a writer.
• Hughes wrote plays, short stories, and anthologies like The Ways of White Folks (1934) and The Poetry of the Negro (1949, co-edited with Arna Bontemps) in the 1930s and 1940s. He was also known for his column in the Chicago Defender, which introduced the character Jesse B. Semple. This was a funny character who talked about serious issues that African-Americans were dealing with. Hughes was politically left-leaning and sympathetic to Communism in the 1930s. In 1932, he went to the Soviet Union to work on a movie about African-Americans.
• Later, during the Spanish Civil War, he reported from Spain. During the Red Scare, people paid attention to his connections to the Communist Party, even though he never officially joined. Red scare is a form of moral panic provoked by fear of the rise of left-wing ideologies in a society, especially communism and socialism. He testified in front of US Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee in 1953, and then he cut ties with the Communist Party. Hughes was still an important figure in African-American letters, even though he had to deal with political problems. His later poetry collections, like Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) and The Panther and the Lash (1967), showed that the fight for racial justice was still going on, echoing the Civil Rights Movement that was starting to grow. His works combined pride in being Black with the rhythms of jazz and blues, making them both easy to understand and very moving. Langston Hughes’s legacy is that he was a poet for the people. His writings showed the full range of African-American life, including its joys, sorrows, humour and strength.
• They also fought against stereotypes and injustice. His belief that literature could be a tool for social change had an effect on writers who came after him, like Alice Walker, James Baldwin and many others. Hughes spoke for people who had been silent for a long time, and his work is still an important part of American literature and culture.

POLITICAL VIEWS AND LEGACY OF LANGSTON HUGHES

• Hughes was very involved in the political fights of his time. For a large part of the 1930s and 1940s, his life and writing showed that he was drawn to Communism as a way to escape the harsh realities of racial segregation in the US. 
• His involvement with leftist movements stemmed not from doctrinal allegiance but from a personal quest for justice, equality and solidarity transcending racial and national divides. Hughes’s interest in Communism is clear in his political writing and poetry, which the University of Missouri Press later put together in two volumes. One of these works is the poem A New Song, which is a direct response to his research into Communism as a way to deal with systemic racial and social inequalities. Hughes would later distance himself from the Communist Party, but these works were an important time in his growth as a writer and activist. Hughes went to the Soviet Union in 1932 with a group of African-Americans who had been asked to help make a movie about racism in the US. 
• He was hired to write the English dialogue, but the movie was never made. Still, this experience opened up new doors for Hughes. He was able to travel all over the Soviet Union and into Central Asia, which are areas that are usually off-limits to Westerners. He met Robert Robinson, an African-American who had moved to Moscow and could not go back home, and Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian writer who was a staunch Communist at the time. Hughes’s interactions with various individuals and his insights into Soviet society provided him with a distinct perspective on race relations, contrasting sharply with the stringent segregation present in the US.
• The movie project was called off because of politics. In 1933, the Soviet Union wanted the US to recognise it diplomatically, so it stopped openly pushing its views on American race issues. Hughes and the other African American participants were not told directly about this change, but as Koestler later said, they eventually figured out that the project’s cancellation was politically motivated. Hughes travelled to China, Japan and Korea in addition to the Soviet Union before returning to the US. These trips made him more aware of the fight against imperialism, colonialism and racism around the world.
• This influenced the internationalist side of his later poetry and activism. Hughes went to Spain in 1937 as a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American and other African-American newspapers to cover the Spanish Civil War. While in Spain, he joined the Republican cause, which many Communists and leftist intellectuals around the world supported. His poems were published in El Mono Azul, a cultural magazine for Spanish Republicans.
• He also reported from Madrid on the radio with activists like Harry Haywood and Walter Benjamin Garland. Hughes’s time in Spain strengthened his political commitment to fighting fascism. He wrote poems like Roar, China! that called for people to stand up to Japanese aggression. This poem, in particular, became a symbol of Hughes’s larger worry about what the scholar W.E.B. Du Bois called the global colour line. Hughes linked the oppression of African-Americans to the struggles of colonised and oppressed populations globally.
• Hughes was also involved with other groups that were led by or connected to Communists, such as the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and the John Reed Clubs. He was not a full member, but he did support causes like the defence of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama. In 1938, he even signed a statement supporting Joseph Stalin, a Soviet politician’s purges.
• This was because of the political climate at the time and because he agreed with what he saw as larger anti-fascist struggles. Hughes joined the American Peace Mobilisation in 1940. At first, the group was against the US entering the Second World War. But Hughes’s opinions changed as things changed. At first, he didn't want Black Americans to fight in the Second World War because of Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, and racial violence at home.
• But as the war went on, he changed his mind and supported Black involvement, especially under the Double V Campaign, which called for victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home. Hughes’s dual commitment showed that he thought the fight for freedom at home and around the world were connected. Hughes was also a humanist in a philosophical way. Anthony Pinn, a scholar, says that Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry and Richard Wright were all part of a tradition of African-American humanists who criticised organised religion and supported non-religious ways of fighting for social change. 
• This viewpoint, frequently overlooked in narratives of the civil rights movement that highlight Christian leadership, contributed a unique perspective to the collective activism. Hughes always said that he was not a formal member of the Communist Party, even though he was friends with some of its members. He said that the Party’s strict rules and centralised orders did not work for him as a writer because he liked to be free.