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Langston Hughes' legacy.

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902. The big name was emblematic of a family history. His maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, was the first black woman to graduate from Oberlin College in Ohio. She married two abolitionists: first Sheridan Leary, who was killed in the raid at Harper's Ferry; and then Charles Langston (Langston Hughes's grandfather), a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad and the founder of several Midwestern schools for African American children. (Charles Langston's brother was John Mercer Langston, who in 1855 won a local Ohio election and became the first African American elected to public office in the United States. In 1888 he became the first black U.S. Congressman elected from Virginia).¹⁴

Hughes's parents divorced when he was very young, and his grandmother reared him. Mary Patterson Langston instilled in her grandson a sense of racial pride and a love for activism. By the time Langston was 14, he had lived in nine places, mostly around the Midwest. His grandmother had first exposed the young boy to the Bible and to The Crisis, the magazine of the recently formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Hughes never took to religion, but writing was another story. Hughes entered Columbia University and, at his father's insistence, studied engineering instead of writing. A businessman and lawyer, James Hughes had left America for Mexico City when Langston was very young. He was an outspoken critic of American racism although he believed the sad plight of American blacks was self-inflicted. In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes bluntly wrote, "My father hated Negroes." In spite of their troubled relationship, James Hughes consented to pay for Langston's education at Columbia, provided that his son study engineering. His son, however, had already discovered poetry. Hughes dropped out after two semesters, in 1922 citing racial prejudice there – but while in New York he did learn something that would perhaps serve him even better – he discovered Harlem.

Though Columbia wasn't right for Hughes, he did earn a bachelor's degree. After spending several years in Europe, Hughes enrolled in the historically black Lincoln University, where he completed his education.

After college, Hughes returned to New York, where he would remain a resident of Harlem for most of his life. He became part of the vibrant community of black artists who drove the Harlem Renaissance – his contemporaries included Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, and more.¹⁵

Hughes found the idea of Communism interesting as an alternative to segregation. Though his interest led him to visit the Soviet Union and travel throughout the country, he never officially joined the Communist Party. This saved him during the 1950s, when he was called before Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to answer to allegations of Communism. His interest wasn't deemed deep enough for any serious consequences. Hughes had already taken the black literary community by storm in 1921 with the publication of the poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," and on his return to America, he was taken under the wing of such luminaries as W.E.B. Du Bois; novelist and Crisis editor Jessie Fauset; and scholar Alain Locke, whose The New Negro (1925) became the definitive artistic anthology of the period¹⁶.

In 1926, Hughes wrote the essay that some considered a manifesto for the Renaissance, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." Published in The Nation, the essay called for the coexistence of racial pride and artistic integrity. "We younger Negro artists now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame," the 24-year-old wrote. "We know we are beautiful. And ugly too." In 1926 Hughes published his first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues, which was infused with rhythms of blues and jazz. Both the black and white press (even the white southern press) hailed it as a masterpiece. Hughes considered his follow-up collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew(1927), superior to The Weary Blues -- more experimental, more representative of black America. But nobody else seemed to think so at the time. The white press found the title offensive (a title Hughes said he regretted and would have changed, had his publisher asked) and the black press was offended by everything else. Hughes's predilection for dialect and his focus on poor blacks was lambasted as a "disgrace to the race." Headlines trumpeted Hughes's transgressions:¹⁷ "Langston Hughes's Book of Poems Trash" and "Langston Hughes -- The Sewer Dweller." The once-dubbed "Negro poet laureate" had become the "poet low rate of Harlem." Hughes was charged with parading negative images of blacks in front of white readers. But polished, educated blacks, he felt, were not the only blacks worth putting on paper. The people who captured his imagination and populated his work, he said in The Big Sea, were "the ordinary Negroes [who] hadn't heard of the Negro Renaissance." Early on, a critic had called Hughes's poetry "proletarian" because of his closeness to everyday people in everyday situations. His trademark became his fusion of black speech and music, primarily jazz and blues (though later in his career he would incorporate gospel, with less success), with verse and stories about the urban North and the rural South. The traveling bug bit again in the '30s. Hughes's tours of the American South and the Soviet Union had a tremendous impact on his poetry of the next decade. In the '30s it took on a left-leaning bent; in the '40s seething condemnation of racism in America.¹⁸ Despite his travels, he would make his home in Harlem until the end of his life. In 1951 Hughes published his most important volume of poetry in years. Montage of a Dream Deferred hearkened back to those early volumes in which the form and sound of the poetry are integrally related to its meaning. Early jazz had given way to a new form, bebop, and bebop's discordant rhythms suffused Montage, mirroring the growing unrest and unease in urban black communities. Hughes would never again be so socially relevant. The Black Power movement of the '60s, which was gaining momentum, especially among urban blacks, criticized Hughes for being too conciliatory toward whites. Hughes responded with a book of poetry about the civil rights movement, The Panther and the Lash, which was published posthumously.

By the time of his death from cancer on May 22, 1967, Langston Hughes had been in the public eye for more than 40 years. Unlike his famous ancestors, the grandson and nephew stayed out of the political arena -- at least officially¹⁹.

Though he may be best known as a poet, Hughes was prolific in a wide variety of writing styles. He wrote 16 volumes of poetry, two novels, three short story collections, 20 plays, novels, essays, historical works, musical shows. In addition, nonfiction books such as A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, children's books. He edited the literary magazine Common Ground, co-wrote the screenplay for Way Down South, and wrote two autobiographies.

Awards:

1926: Hughes won the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Prize.

1935: Hughes was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to travel to Spain and Russia.

1941: Hughes was awarded a fellowship from the Rosenwald Fund.

1943: Lincoln University awarded Hughes an honorary Litt.D.

1954: Hughes won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

1960: the NAACP awarded Hughes the Spingarn Medal for distinguished achievements by an African American.

1961: National Institute of Arts and Letters.

1963: Howard University awarded Hughes an honorary doctorate.

1964: Western Reserve University awarded Hughes an honorary Litt.D.

1973: the first Langston Hughes Medal was awarded by the City College of New York²⁰.

1979: Langston Hughes Middle School was created in Reston, Virginia.

1981: New York City Landmark status was given to the Harlem home of Langston Hughes at 20 East 127th Street (40°48′26.32″N 73°56′25.54″W) by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and 127th Street was renamed Langston Hughes Place. The Langston Hughes House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

2002: The United States Postal Service added the image of Langston Hughes to its Black Heritage series of postage stamps.

2002: scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Langston Hughes on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

2015: Google Doodle commemorated his 113th birthday. After his death, the City College of New York began awarding an annual Langston Hughes Medal to an influential and engaging African-American writer.

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