Celebrate and honor Langston
26th December 2018 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
Far too often we wait until the month of February to celebrate the men and women whose contributions continue to enrich our lives.
Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes was such a force in my life as a writer and black man. I refuse to wait until February to celebrate a brother who gave so much to so many people of African descent and resonated with beauty, strength and brilliance.
James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri.
In all, Langston Hughes wrote some 60 books and was the first African-American writer to earn a living with his craft.
The United States Postal Service honored the memory and legacy of Langston Hughes during Black History Month five years ago with a commemorative 34-cent stamp. Hughes would have been 105 on Feb. 1, 2006.
Hughes’ poetry collections include The Weary Blues (1926), Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), Fields of Wonder (1947), One-Way Ticket (1949), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) and The Panther and the Lash (1967). Langston Hughes also wrote columns for two newspapers in which he gave voice to the inimitable character Jesse B. Semple (more about that later), short stories – including 1934’s The Ways of White Folks – stage plays, autobiographies, anthologies and translations of poetry by F. Garcia Lorca and G. Mistral.
Two of his books were autobiographies, The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder As I Wander (1956).
Remarkably, at the age of 19, Hughes penned the unforgettable “The Negro Speaks of Rivers (For W.E.B. DuBois)” which was first published in The Crisis, the NAACP’s publication.
Hughes’ life and legacy are testaments to the importance of following one’s heart and dreams. Many people don’t know that Langston Hughes was never supposed to be a poet or a writer of any kind. After spending time in Mexico with his father, Hughes enrolled at Columbia University in 1921 as an engineering student but withdrew from the Ivy League institution a year later. In 1923, the world became his classroom after he was hired to work aboard an Africa-bound freighter. This allowed him to visit several ports in Africa and later he would gain work as a dishwasher in a Paris cabaret.
Eventually, he was forced to return to the United States but not before gaining an appreciation for the fact that the world was much bigger than Joplin, Mo., Cleveland, OH – where he went to high school – or even Harlem, USA. Upon his return, he worked a number of jobs, including a brief stint in the office of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the founder of Black History Week (which later evolved into Black History Month).
I would venture to say that Langston Hughes, more so than any other writer of African descent, represented the spirit and essence of African America. In his writings, one finds the joy and pain, laughter, sorrow, glory and “ugly beauty” of blackness. Langston Hughes was a revolutionary in his own right, using his gift as a wordsmith to help us to understand and appreciate our beauty as a people. At a time when the larger society was lynching Black people like we were going out of style and seizing every opportunity to tell us that we were worthless, Langston was holding up a mirror and defiantly showing us just how beautiful and regal we were and are.
The focus of much of his work was everyday people, the Black masses of African America who lived and sang the blues, who created and listened to jazz, who tried to find meaning in the suffering and struggling they were forced to endure in America. Langston Hughes was inspired by them and in turn used his gift to inspire them.
In “My People,” Hughes wrote:
The night is beautiful/So are the faces of my people/The stars are beautiful/So are the eyes of my people/Beautiful also is the sun/Beautiful also are the souls of my people.
Although he moved on to the village of the ancestors in 1967, Langston Hughes’ words and spirit live on. As we move deeper into the new millennium and grow to depend more on computers and technology in our daily lives, we need to pause and pay homage to this creative, prolific brother whose writings inspire us to reach even greater heights personally, creatively, culturally and professionally. Throughout his life, he made it a personal mission to inspire and encourage other writers to fully develop their gifts.
After meeting with Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of Bethune Cookman College in Florida, Hughes traveled across the South to share his poetry with people below the Mason-Dixie line. During one of those trips, he visited the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama, the young men wrongfully accused of raping two white women. Their plight left such an impression on him that he used it as inspiration for writing poetry and at least one of his many plays.
For some 22 years, he worked as a newspaper columnist for The Chicago Defender and The New York Post, using the fictional character Jesse B. Semple (aka Simple) to tackle a number of social issues with humor and satire.
In 1941, Hughes defended Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute, who was widely criticized for being an accommodationist who pandered to the interests of wealthy and powerful southern whites. In his poem “Ballad of Booker T.,” Langston Hughes wrote: Sometimes he had/compromise in his talk/for a man must crawl/before he can walk/and in Alabama in ‘85/a joker was lucky/to be alive.
It was amazing to think that this brother was able to do so much with so little free time. In all, he wrote some 60 books over four decades, no small feat. He wrote, edited, translated and published at a feverish pace, but it was evidently a labor of love. Even after his death, there was still a considerable amount of his work still to be published.
Hughes’ work is dripping with Black consciousness, cultural pride, urgency and resilience. “I, Too, Sing America” is a perfect example of how the talented writer takes the specific and makes it universal. It follows:
I, too, sing America/I am the darker brother/They send me to eat in the kitchen/When company comes/But I laugh/And eat well/And grow strong. Tomorrow,/I’ll sit at the table/When company comes/Nobody’ll dare/Say to me/ “Eat in the kitchen,”/ Then.
Besides/ They’ll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed–
I, too, am America.
Mind you, this poem was published in 1926, nearly three decades before Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It was also nearly 50 years before the phrase “Black is beautiful” became popular in African America and Soul Brother No. 1 James Brown was encouraging Black folks to say out loud how proud they were to be Black.
Langston Hughes was a visionary artist, a man ahead of his time. Even though he also used the word “Negro” in his poetry, he recognized the beauty of African Americans and saw it as an asset and not a liability at a time when skin bleaches and conks were commonplace. Simply put, this brother was baddddd.
In another of his poems, “Warning,” Hughes gave white America an ultimatum. The first stanza reads:
Negroes/ Sweet and docile/Meek, humble and kind:/Beware the day/ They change their minds!
Amen, brother.
This article originally published in the December 24, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
