Langston Hughs Part 2

Shalom:
The Harlem Renaissance was a phase of a larger New Negro movement that had emerged in the early 20th century and in some ways ushered in the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was the hay day of Black culture; where people from all over America came to celebration African American culture.

 The social foundations of this movement included the Great Migration of African Americans, including my grandmother and her children from rural to urban spaces and from the South to the North; dramatically rising levels of literacy; the creation of national organizations dedicated to pressing African American civil rights, “uplifting” the race, and opening socioeconomic opportunities; and developing race pride, including pan-African sensibilities and programs. Black exiles and expatriates from the Caribbean and Africa crossed paths in metropolis such as New York City and Paris, after World War I and had an invigorating influence on each other that gave the broader “Negro renaissance” (as it was then known) a profoundly important international cast, including black artists, writers, plays, books and music.
Amoung these artist, was the poet-writer, Langston Hughs.
When one thinks of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hugh's name is usually amoung the first to come up.
As stated in part one on this post about Hughs, Langston was a proud black man, proud of his heritage and of his people, a pride reflected in his work. He identified unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé. He stressed the theme of "black is beautiful" as he explored the black human condition in a variety of depths.  His main concern was the uplift of his people, whose strengths, resiliency, courage, and humor he wanted to record as part of the general American experience.
His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture.
"My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind," Hughes is quoted as saying. He confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself; a “people’s poet” who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, and works for children. With the encouragement of his best friend and writer, Arna  Bontemps  and patron and friend, Carl Van Vechten, he wrote two volumes of autobiography, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, as well as translating several works of literature into English.
Hughes wanted young black writers to be objective about their race, but not to scorn it, be ashamed or flee from it. He understood the main points of the  Black Power movement of the 1960s, but believed that some of the younger black writers who supported it were too angry in their work, while many young black writers thought him a sell out. Hughes's work Panther and the Lash, posthumously published in 1967, was intended to show solidarity with these writers, but with more skill and devoid of the most virulent anger and racial chauvinism some showed toward whites.
Amoung his discoveries was author Alice Walker, who hails Mr. Hughs as one of her heroes.
Author Loften Mitchell observed of Hughes:

"Langston set a tone, a standard of brotherhood and friendship and cooperation, for all of us to follow. You never got from him, 'I am the Negro writer,' but only 'I am a Negro writer.' He never stopped thinking about the rest of us."

The month before my 10th birthday, May 22, 1967, Mr. Hughs died from complications after abdominal surgery, related to prostate cancer at the age of 65.
 His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer in the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harem. 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 Rivers." Within the center of the cosmogram is the line: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers".
A river that continues to flow and enrich the lives of all Americans today.

 

 

Black History Month: Langston Hughs Part One

Shalom:
Today I share about one of my favorite poets, Langdon Hughs.

James Mercer Langston Hughs, better known to his readers as Langston Hughs was born on February 1, 1902. His family history alone is a American story.
Like most African Americans, Langston Hughs came from a multicultural background made up of slaves and slave owners. Both of his paternal great-grandmothers were African-Americans and both his paternal great-grandfathers Kentucky were white slave owners.
 One of his great-grandfathers was Sam Clay, a Scottish-American whiskey distiller of Henry County and supposedly a relative of Henry Clay. The other was Silas Cushenberry, a Jewish-American slave trader of Clark County. Hughes's maternal grandmother Mary Patterson was of African-American, French, English and Native American descent. One of the first women to attend Oberlin College, Mary Patterson  first married Lewis Sheridan Leary, also of mixed race. Lewis Sheridan Leary subsequently joined John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry in 1959 and died from his wounds.
Ten years later, the Widow Leary, married again, this time into the elite, politically active Langston family. Her second husband was Charles Henry Langston,  of African-American, Native American, and Euro-American ancestry. He and his younger brother John Mercer Langston worked for the Abolitionist cause and helped lead the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1858. Charles Langston later moved to Kansas, where he was active as an educator and activist for voting and rights for African Americans. Charles and Mary's daughter Caroline was the mother of Langston Hughes.
Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes. He grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns. Hughes was a young child, when his father left the family and later divorced Carrie, going to first Cuba and then Mexico, seeking to escape the enduring racism in the Untied States.
After the divorce of his parents, while his mother traveled seeking employment, young Langston was raised mainly by his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. Through the black American oral tradition and drawing from the activist experiences of her generation, Mary Langston instilled in her grandson a lasting sense of racial pride as well as a love of words and story telling. A great story teller herself, it was Mary who transferred to him her love of literature and the importance of an education. His childhood in Lawrence, Kansas was a lonely one, save his friends, his books.
After the death of his grandmother, he went to live with family friends, James and Mary Reed, for two years. In 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."
Having remarried, Langston went to live again with his mother Carrie in Lincoln, Illinois, eventually the family settled in Cleveland, Ohio where he attended high school. 
While attending grammer school in Lincoln, Hughes was elected class poet. Hughes stated that in retrospect he thought it was because of the stereotype that African Americans have rhythm.

"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."

During high school in Cleveland, 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 he was in high school.
The relationship between Hugh and his father was poor. He never understood why the elder left his family, his country, even had a dislike of his own people.
Langston Hughs once said about his father:"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." He did live with his father in Mexico for a brief period in 1919. His father was willing to  he was willing to provide financial assistance to his son but did not support his desire to be a writer. The two men came to a compromise; Hughes was to study engineering, and as long as he would attend Columbia. His tuition provided; Hughes 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, and his interests revolved more around the neighborhood of Harlem than his studies, though he continued writing poetry.
More about Langston Hughs in the next entry.