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James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967)
James Mercer Langston Hughes was known as one of the best as a poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry and for penning a poem for EMMETT TILL. He was a voice in WWII. Some critics have said he was a hidden homosexual and called him a communist. To me it is unimportant wheather he was homosexual or not. He was a human. A black man that loved being black and not afraid to say it, and stayed true to his art.
Poem Mississippi—1955 (1955)
(To the Memory of Emmett Till)
Oh what sorrow!
oh, what pity!
Oh, what pain
That tears and blood
Should mix like rain
And terror come again
To Mississippi.
Come again?
Where has terror been?
On vacation? Up North?
In some other section
Of the nation,
Lying low, unpublicized?
Masked—with only
Jaundiced eyes
Showing through the mask?
Oh, what sorrow,
Pity, pain,
That tears and blood
Should mix like rain
In Mississippi!
And terror, fetid hot,
Yet clammy cold
Remain.
The Money Mississippi Blues (1955)
Lyrics by Langston Hughes; Music by Jobe Huntley
I don’t want to go to Money, honey,
not Money, Mississippi!
no, I wouldn’t go to Money, honey,
down in Mississippi.
There’s pity, sorrow, and pain
in Money, Mississippi.
Tears and blood like rain
in Money, Mississippi,
in Money, Mississippi!
His father died for democracy
fighting in the army over the sea.
His father died for the U. S. A.
Why did they treat his son this a-way?
in Money, Money, Mississippi,
Money, Mississippi.
His mother worked to raise her child,
dressed him neat, kept him from running wild.
She sent him to the country when vacation came,
but he never got back to Chicago the same.
They sent him back in a wooden box—-
from Money, Money, Mississippi,
Money, Mississippi.
Like old boy, just fourteen years old,
shot, kicked, and beaten ‘cause he was so bold
to whistle at a woman who was white.
He was throwed in the river in the dead of night
In Money, Money, Mississippi,
Money, Mississippi.
I don’t want to go to Money, honey,
not Money, Mississippi.
No, I wouldn’t want to go to Money, honey,
down in Mississippi.
There’s pity, sorrow, and pain
in Money, Mississippi!
Tears and blood like rain
in Money, Mississippi,
in Money, Mississippi!
No, I wouldn’t want to go—
for no kind o’ Money—
to Money, Mississippi,
not Money, Mississippi!
Money, Mississippi!
(Blues guitar accompaniment)
He was born on February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934). His mother was a school teacher. He grew up in Midwestern small towns. Hughes’s father left his family and later divorced Carrie, going to Cuba and then Mexico seeking to escape the enduring racism in the United States
After the divorce of his parents, while his mother traveled seeking employment as a teacher He was raised mainly by his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas the majority of his years. His grandmother was very stern.
Soon After the death of his grandmother, he went to live with family friends, James and Mary Reed, for two years. In his novel the Big Sea he wrote, “I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas”
Langston Hughes returned to lived again with his mother Carrie in Lincoln, Illinois. They lived in Cleveland Ohio where he attended high school. He was very well in his academic studies and well liked. During high school in Cleveland, he was elected class poet, he wrote for the school newspaper, edited the yearbook, and began to write his first short stories, poetry, and dramatic plays. His first piece of jazz poetry, “When Sue Wears Red”, was written while in school. He states here in one statement about how he felt in school in Cleveland.
“I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everyone knows, except us, that all Negroes have rhythm, so they elected me as class poet”
.He had a dysfunctional relationship with his father. He lived with his father in Mexico for a brief period in 1919. Upon graduating from high school in June 1920, He returned to Mexico to live with his father, hoping to convince him to support his s plans to attend Columbia University. Langston Hughes later stated that, prior to arriving in Mexico: “I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn’t understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much.”
His father was willing to provide financial assistance to him but did not support his desire to be a writer. He and his father came to an understanding. He would study engineering, so long as he could attend Columbia the reason for the engineering is that is what his father wanted him to do. His tuition was provided. He left his father after more than a year. While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade average. He left in 1922 because of racial prejudice.
In November 1924, he went back to his mother to live in the Washington DC area. He worked in different jobs eventually gaining stronger position as a personal assistant to Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. This position did not permit the time he wanted to spend writing his piety. He ended up quitting the assistant position and worked as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel. There his road was open and he met Vachel Lindsay.. As the work demands limited his time for writing, Hughes quit the position to work as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel. He and Lindsay shared each other poetry. Lindsay was so impressed by Langston poems he publicized Langston poems as the new black poet.
He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz. His life work were enormously important in transforming the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s as a writer unlike any other African American of that time period which were Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen ect. He refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the average experience of the blacks in America. He wanted to tell the true stories of his people in his known way of poetry. Here is an excerpt from one of his poems:
The night is beautiful,
so the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people
Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.
Moreover, Hughes stressed the importance of a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism absent of self-hate that united people of African descent and Africa across the globe and encouraged pride in their own diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. Langston Hughes was one of the few black writers of any consequence to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists. His African-American race consciousness and cultural nationalism would influence many foreign black writers
On May 22, 1967, Hughes died from complications after abdominal surgery, related to prostate cancer, at the age of 65.
Langston Hughes was cremated and his remains are beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer in the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. It is the entrance to an auditorium named for him. The design on the floor is an African cosmogram titled Rivers. The title is taken from his poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivess”. Within the center of the cosmogram is the line: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers”
The following will be listed one of his poems and literature available.
A poem so true from yesterday stands still and remain and meaning the same today.
•
I speak in the name of the black millions
Awakening to action.
Let all others keep silent a moment
I have this word to bring,
This thing to say,
This song to sing:
Bitter was the day
When I bowed my back
Beneath the slaver’s whip.
That day is past.
Bitter was the day
When I saw my children unschooled,
My young men without a voice in the world,
My women taken as the body-toys
Of a thieving people.
That day is past.
Bitter was the day, I say,
When the lyncher’s rope
Hung about my neck,
And the fire scorched my feet,
And the oppressors had no pity,
And only in the sorrow songs
Relief was found.
That day is past.
I know full well now
Only my own hands,
Dark as the earth,
Can make my earth-dark body free.
O thieves, exploiters, killers,
No longer shall you say
With arrogant eyes and scornful lips:
“You are my servant,
Black man-
I, the free!”
That day is past-
For now,
In many mouths-
Dark mouths where red tongues burn
And white teeth gleam-
New words are formed,
Bitter
With the past
But sweet
With the dream.
Tense,
Unyielding,
Strongand sure,
They sweep the earth-
Revolt! Arise!
The Black
And White World
Shall be one!
The Worker’s World!
The past is done!
A new dream flames
Against the
Sun!
The Weary Blues Knopf, 1926
Fine Clothes to the Jew, Knopf, 1927
The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations, 1931
Dear Lovely Death, 1931
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, Knopf, 1932
Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play, Golden Stair Press, N.Y., 1932
Let American Be America Again 1938
Shakespeare in Harlem, Knopf, 1942
Freedom’s Plow, 1943
Fields of Wonder, Knopf, 1947
One-Way Ticket, 1949
Montage of a Dream Deferred Holt, 1951
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1958
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, Hill & Wang, 1961
The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times, 1967
Novels and short story collections
Not Without Laughter Knopf, 1930
The Ways of White Folks. Knopf, 1934
Simple Speaks His Mind. 1950
Laughing to Keep from Crying, Holt, 1952
Simple Takes a Wife. 1953
Sweet Flypaper of Life, photographs by Roy DeCarva. 1955
Simple Stakes a Claim. 1957
Tambourines to Glory 1958
The Best of Simple. 1961
Simple’s Uncle Sam. 1965
Something in Common and Other Stories. Hill & Wang, 1963
Major plays
Mule Bone with Zora Neale Hurston. 1931
Mulatto. 1935 (renamed The Barrier, an opera in 1950)
Troubled Island, with William Grant Still 1936
Little Ham. 1936
Emperor of Haiti. 1936
Don’t You Want to be Free? 1938
Street Scene contributed lyrics. 1947
Tambourines to Glory. 1956
Simply Heavenly. 1957
Black Nativity 1961
Five Plays by Langston Hughes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.
Jerichoo-Jim Crow 1964
Chldren Books
Popo and Fifina, with Arna Bontemps. 1932
The First Book of the Negroes. 1952
The First Book of Jazz. 1954
Marian Anderson Famous Concert Singer. with Steven C. Tracy 1954
The First Book of Rhythms. 1954
The First Book of the West Indies. 1956
First Book of Africa. 1964
Non-fiction books
The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940
Famous American Negroes. 1954
I Wonder as I Wander. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1956
A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, with Milton Meltzer 1956
Famous Negro Heroes of America. 1958
Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP. 1962