Langston Hughes: The Poet Laureate and the Radical

Langston Hughes (1901-1967) stands as one of the most defining voices of American literature, yet the familiar image of the polite "poet laureate of Harlem" obscures a far more complex and radical figure. Born in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in Kansas by his abolitionist grandmother—who wrapped him in the blood-stained shawl of a veteran of John Brown’s raid—Hughes inherited a legacy of resistance that would shape his work.

Rejecting the expectations of his wealthy, disdainful father, Hughes led a nomadic life. He threw his Columbia University textbooks into the ocean and worked on freighters to Africa and Europe, absorbing the vernacular of ordinary Black people. As a architect of the Harlem Renaissance, he clashed with the "talented tenth" by insisting on writing about the beauty and the ugliness of working-class life. His 1926 manifesto, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," declared the right of Black artists to express their "dark-skinned selves without fear or shame."

Beyond the poetry, Hughes was a radical leftist whose travels to the Soviet Union and incendiary early poems like "Goodbye Christ" drew the ire of Joseph McCarthy. In 1953, he was forced to publicly disavow his past to survive the hearings. Yet he never stopped agitating; he simply channeled his critique into his beloved character Jesse B. Semple ("Simple"), a Harlem everyman whose humor masked devastating truths about race.

Hughes’s influence extended directly into the Civil Rights Movement, providing the poetic blueprint for Martin Luther King Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech. When he died in 1967, his ashes were interred beneath the floor of the Schomburg Center in Harlem, inscribed with his own words: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." He remains the foundation upon which so much of modern Black literature is built.

Transcript

can you give me a title and a 300 word summary Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Langston Hughes. If I say that name, I'm guessing a very specific image pops into your head. You know, maybe it's a black and white photo of this handsome, smiling man in a suit, or maybe it's a few lines of poetry you had to memorize back in high school, something about rivers, something about dreams, right, A Raisin in the Sun. He's the poet laureate of Harlem right, the safe, accessible face of the Harlem Renaissance that ends up on postage stamps, which is just so ironic, because safe is probably the last word I would ever use to describe the actual man, really. Oh yeah, we're talking about a guy who spent his 20s working on freight ships to Africa, who literally threw his Columbia University textbooks into the ocean. Wow. He was getting chased out of towns for his politics. He was a radical leftist, almost certainly a closeted gay man in a deeply homophobic era, and a writer who was being investigated by the FBI for decades. See, that's the disconnect we really want to get into today. The textbook version of Hughes is this polite, almost quiet observer of black life. But the reality, I mean, this was the architect of the black vernacular in American literature. He was the guy who looked at the whole high society, new Negro movement and just said, No, that's not my subject. Exactly. I'm not writing about the doctors and the lawyers. I'm writing about the guy cleaning the spittoons and the woman working the street corner. He was a literary architect. Absolutely. He built this incredible bridge between the 19th century oral traditions, the spirituals, the field haulers, the folk tales, all this stuff that wasn't written down precisely, and he connected it to the sharp, jagged modernism of the 20th century. He didn't just document the Harlem Renaissance in a very real way. He defined its voice, and he did all of it while living this incredibly nomadic life. So that's the mission for this deep dive. We are trying to strip away that required reading veneer get past the poster on the classroom wall, yeah, and look at the man who lived this nomadic, often pretty dangerous life, who faced down Senator Joseph McCarthy and who essentially drafted the blueprint for Martin Luther King Jr's I Have a Dream speech, and we've got the sources to do it. We're pulling from biographies, from the declassified Senate transcripts, which are just wild to read. Oh, they're incredible. And his own letters, his own voice. And you know, we should probably start by correcting the record on day one. Literally, if you open up a standard encyclopedia, or you look at some of the older biographies, you'll see his birth year listed as 1902 right? Joplin, Missouri, 1902 that's the standard fact, except it's not a fact anymore. It's wrong, yeah. New research that only came out around 2018 based on, of all things, parish records in Joplin, shows he was actually born on February 1 1901. Okay, so he's one year older in the grand scheme of a literary giant. I mean, does a 12 month difference actually change how we should read him? I think it does, in a subtle way. It anchors him more firmly in that 19th century legacy we were just talking about. It means he was just that much older and more aware during the horrific red summer of 1919, with all the race riots, It just shifts the timeline of his exposure to racial violence, and it also just reminds us that even with someone as famous as studied as Hughes, history isn't static. It's not set in stone. We're still learning the basic facts of his life, and that life, it really started in chaos. Joplin, Missouri, was not a happy home. His parents, James and Carrie, they separated very, very early, and the dynamic there is,

Unknown Speaker  3:32  
well, it's psychologically heavy. It really is. His mother, Carrie, she was an itinerant worker, constantly moving to find jobs, which was just the reality for so many black women then. But his father, James Nathaniel Hughes is a character that feels like he walked straight out of a Greek tragedy. He is the villain of the early story, but he's a complicated one. James Hughes didn't just leave the family. He fled the United States entirely, right? He goes to Mexico. He moves to Mexico, eventually settling in Toluca. And he didn't go there for the weather. He went there because he absolutely, profoundly loathed American racism, which sounds like a principled stand on the surface. It does, until you dig into his actual views. James Hughes hated the racism in America, but that hatred curdled into a kind of disdain for African Americans themselves. He was cold, hard man. He felt that black Americans were somehow responsible for their own condition because they weren't industrious enough. Wow. He looked at the robber barons of the era, the Rockefellers, the carnegies, and he'd say, why aren't we doing that? He completely internalized the racism of the aggressor. It's that tragic psychological phenomenon where the victim adopts the logic of the oppressor just to survive. It is so he's down to Mexico, getting wealthy, running a ranch and mining operations, literally putting physical distance between himself and his own blackness. Meanwhile, Langston is back in the Midwest, effectively an orphan with two living parents, and this is where the most important.

Unknown Speaker  5:00  
Important figure in his entire childhood. Steps in. He's raised largely in Lawrence, Kansas, by his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston. And you cannot understand Langston Hughes without understanding Mary Langston, not at all. She was not just a grandmother baking cookies. I was reading about her history, and it is absolutely jaw dropping. She was the widow of Louis Sheridan Leary, a name that should ring a bell for Civil War buffs, for sure, Leary was one of the men who rode with John Brown. He died fighting at the raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, he was a martyr for abolition, exactly. And Mary, his widow, kept the shawl that Leary was wearing when he was shot. It was riddled with bullet holes and blood stains, and she didn't just, you know, hide it in a trunk somewhere. No she would wrap young Langston in that shawl on cold Kansas nights. Just pause on that image for a second. You're a lonely kid. Your dad hates his own race and lives in another country. Your mom has always gone looking for work, and you are literally being swaddled in the blood stained gamut of a man who died trying to free the slaves. I mean, that is a heavy, heavy narrative to place on a six year old child. It is. She raised him on these stories of resistance, of heroism, of what freedom actually costs. She told him about his other grandfather, Charles Langston, who was also an abolitionist and stood trial for rescuing a runaway slave. So she gave him what he couldn't get from his parents, she gave him a narrative framework of nobility.

Unknown Speaker  6:25  
He might have been poor, he might have been lonely, but she made damn sure he knew he came from a line of warriors. It really explains that steel spine he had later in life, but even with that heroic lineage inside the house, the moment he stepped outside, he is dealing with the crushing reality of Jim Crow in the Midwest. Lawrence Kansas has this reputation as a free state stronghold, but the reality for a black child was very, very different, and that leads to the Nickelodeon incident, which Hughes himself cited as a real turning point. What happened there? He was a young boy, maybe seven or eight, and he went to a movie theater in Lawrence. He puts his nickel on the counter, you know, excited to see the show, but the ticket taker didn't give him a ticket. She just, she just pushed the nickel back across the marble counter, didn't say a word, just pointed to a sign, dollar not admitted. And it wasn't the violence of a lynching. It was the cold, bureaucratic rejection. He said later that the way she pushed that coin back, that physical gesture of refusal, was his first true realization of the division between American citizens. He never went to a movie in Lawrence again, never. It's those small, quiet moments that can radicalize you just as much as the loud ones, absolutely. So he moves around a bit to Kika, then eventually to Lincoln, Illinois, where he's living with his mother again, and this is where he gets elected class poet in grammar school. But the backstory to this is, I mean, it's hilarious, and it tells you everything about the racial stereotypes of the time. Chuckles really does. So there were only two black kids in the entire class, him and one other girl, right? And the teacher needs a class poet, and the white students based on absolutely nothing but pure prejudice. Just assumed that African Americans had rhythm, of course. So they elected Langston, not because he was a good writer, but because they thought, well, he must be good at rhyme. He hadn't even written a poem yet, not a single one. But he took the title. He said later, I was the victim of a stereotype. There was no one else to do it, so I had to do it. But it worked. It forced him to write, and once he started, he clearly didn't stop. He moves to Cleveland for high school, Central High, which was actually a surprisingly integrated and progressive school for the time it was. He starts writing for the school paper. He's reading Carl Sandburg, and he discovers Walt Whitman. And Whitman seems to be the big unlock for him. Whitman is the key Leaves of Grass. Whitman wrote about American democracy, about the common man, the worker, the open road. He wrote in free verse, breaking all those rigid structures of European poetry. And Hughes saw that and thought, I can do this for my people. I can sing the song of the darker brother. So he graduates high school in 1920 and now he has to confront his father again. He takes a train to Mexico to visit James, a stiff split to try and get money for college, but that relationship is just toxic. His dad is telling him, don't be a writer. Writers are bums. Be an engineer. Go to Europe. Get away from black people just constantly belittling his ambitions. It was a tense journey, and it's on this train ride crossing the Mississippi River at sunset that Hughes writes his first masterpiece. He's what, 17, maybe 18 years old. Yeah, just a teenager. He looks out the window, sees the muddy river turning gold in the sunset, and he starts thinking about the history of his race, the deep history. He grabs an envelope, and he just scribbles out. The Negro speaks of rivers. I've known rivers. I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood and human veins. It's unbelievable that a teenager wrote that it sounds like the voice of an ancient sage. It does. And look at what.

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
Is doing there strategically. He's linking black identity, not to slavery, which was the dominant narrative that black history began in chains, right? But to the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile. He's claiming geological deep time. He's saying we were here when the pyramids were built. We were here at the dawn of civilizations. There's a massive, profound reclamation of dignity. And he sends it off to the crisis the NAACP magazine and the great WEB Du Bois himself publishes it. He's officially a poet, but he still has to deal with his dad. They strike this deal. Langston can go to Columbia University in New York on his dad's dime, but only if he studies something practical, something that will make money, exactly, engineering. Which brings him to Harlem in 1921 and this is the classic tale of two cities. He hates Columbia. He lives in Hartley Hall. He's one of the few black students, and the racism is, you know, it's polite, but it's cold and institutional. He feels completely suffocated, but the moment he steps off campus and takes the subway uptown to Harlem. It's like the world goes from black and white to Technicolor. It's the Mecca. He spends all his time in the jazz clubs, the cabarets, just walking the streets, listening. He realizes that the school of life is where the real material is, not in some stuffy lecture hall. So in 1922 he does something that must have absolutely horrified his father. He drops out. And he doesn't just drop out to, you know, hang around cafes and write poetry. He signs up as a mess boy on a freighter, the SS Malone, bound for West Africa. And this leads to one of my favorite anecdotes in all of literary history. It's the book dump. It's such a cinematic moment, you have to picture it. The ship is steaming out of New York Harbor. Hughes has this trunk full of books, all the stuff he was forced to study at Columbia, the dry academic European canon, all the dead white guys, basically. And he drags the trunk to the ship's rail, and he starts throwing them overboard one by one. He's jettisoning the weight of the academy. He's saying, I don't need this to be a writer. Exactly. He's clearing the deck literally and metaphorically, but, and this is the crucial detail. He keeps one book Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. That's the only one he couldn't part with. It's a statement of allegiance. He's saying, I am going to experience the world raw like Whitman did, and he did. He went to Senegal, Nigeria, the Congo. And this wasn't some romantic vacation, not at all. He saw the beauty of Africa, for sure, but he also saw the brutality of colonialism, the British and French exploitation. It was an education in global racial politics. He eventually ends up in Paris in 1924 flat broke and this is not the lost generation Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald drinking fine wine no Hughes is working as a dishwasher in a nightclub called Le Grand Duke. He's seeing the Jazz Age from the kitchen through the swinging doors, which is the perfect vantage point for him, isn't it? It's a perfect vantage point. He's close to the music, but he's among the workers. He sees how the black jazz musicians are treated like royalty in Paris, while back home, they'd be forced to use the service entrance. It broadens his perspective on race. It's an American problem, sure, but it's also a global dynamic. He comes back to the US in 1925 still working menial jobs. He's a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC, and this is where he pulls a move that requires some serious guts. He sees Vachel Lindsay dining in the restaurant. And Lindsay was a huge deal at the time, a famous white celebrity poet, and he uses just bussing tables. He has three of his poems folded up in his pocket. Now you have to think about the power dynamic here a black buzz boy approaching a white patron in a fancy DC hotel in 1925 you could get fired, or worse, easily. So he doesn't speak to him. He just slides the poems onto the table next to Lindsay's plate and walks away the bus boy poet strategy, and it worked better than he could have ever dreamed. Lindsay reads the poems while he's eating his dinner. He is completely blown away. So what happens that very night, at his own poetry reading, Lindsay announces to the press, I have discovered a genius, a black bus boy at the hotel. The next morning, reporters are swarming the hotel looking for Langston Hughes. It's the Cinderella moment, but instead of a glass slipper, it's a stack of jazz poetry. Chuckles exactly, and this launches him right into the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. But we need to complicate that term, because the Harlem Renaissance wasn't just everyone holding hands and singing Kumbaya. No, there were factions. There was beef. Oh, there was serious beef. You can basically map the entire Harlem Renaissance by looking at the three big literary magazines of a time. Okay, so break it down for us in one lane, you had the crisis run by W, E, B, Du Bois and the NAACP. This was the talented 10th lane. It was respectable, middle class conservative in its style, if not its politics. This was the art that was meant to prove black people were just as good as white people. Exactly refined.

Unknown Speaker  15:00  
Cultured, well behaved. Then in the middle lane, you had opportunity, which was run by the Urban League. They were like the talent scouts. They held a literary contest where Hughes won his first big awards. And then you have the rebels, the punk rocker fire. And yes, that's with two exclamation points. This was a literary journal created by Hughes, Wallace, Thurman, Zora Neale, Hurston and the artist Aaron Douglas in 1926 and what was their mission? They looked at DuBois in the talented 10th and basically said boring. They didn't want to prove they were respectable. They wanted to write about the gritty, messy reality of black life. They wanted to write about prostitution, homosexuality, colorism within the black community, domestic violence, all the stuff you don't talk about in church Exactly. They wanted to shock the bourgeoisie. Hughes wrote a poem for it called elevator boy about the mundane, crushing reality of service work. They were rejecting this idea that art had to be propaganda for racial uplift. They believed art just had to be true, and naturally, the establishment hated it. Loathed it. A critic for the Baltimore Afro American reviewed fire and famously said, I have just tossed the first issue of fire into the fire, which turned out to be kind of prophetic, because the warehouse where all the copies were being stored actually burned down. Right? It did a complete financial disaster. Only one issue was ever published, but it became a legend. It drew a line in the sand between the old guard and the young radicals speaking of fire and legends. We have to talk about his friendship with Zora Neale Hurston for a while there. These two were like the dynamic duo of the Renaissance. They were inseparable. They called themselves the niggerati, a very tongue in cheek, provocative name for the black literary elite. How did they meet? They met at an awards dinner and Hurston, well, Zora was a force of nature. She would walk into a room, throw a red feather boa over her shoulder and just command everyone's attention. They went on that famous road trip together through the south right and Hughes beat up car. They did. They were collecting folklore. This was real anthropological work, but on the ground, they'd stop at turpentine camps, juke joints, people's porches. Zora had this incredible gift for getting people talking, and Langston would be in the background just taking notes. They were obsessed with that low down culture completely the vernacular, the jokes, the songs. They believed that the soul of black America wasn't in the universities or the high society salons, it was in the rural south with the everyday folk and this shared philosophy, this is what leads to Hughes's most famous essay, the Negro artist and the racial mountain. This is his manifesto. It is published in the nation in 1926

Unknown Speaker  17:39  
he's responding to a young black poet who had said, I want to be a poet, not a negro poet, as if those two things were mutually exclusive, right? And Hughes just tears that idea apart. He writes, We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark skinned selves without fear or shame. And then he adds the kicker, if White people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful and ugly too and ugly too. That's the key phrase. He's claiming the right to be fully human flaws and all Exactly. And a huge part of that human expression for him was the music. We call him a jazz poet, but I think a lot of people just assume that means he wrote about jazz, but he was doing something much more technical with the meter, wasn't he? Oh, absolutely. He was trying to make the text on the page replicate the sound of the music in the 20s. That meant the blues, if you read his poem, The Weary Blues. It has that classic AAB blues structure, right? I got the Weary Blues and I can't be satisfied. It has this heavy, dragging rhythm. It lands hard on the beat. It feels like someone moaning the blues, but the music evolves. And by the 1940s and 50s, the blues has morphed into bebop, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk. The music gets faster, more dissonant, more anxious. It's more complex, and Hughes's poetry shifts right along with it. This is what makes him a genius. He didn't get stuck in the 1920s you look at his 1951 collection, montage of a dream deferred. He structures the whole book like a bebop jam session. The lines are short, choppy. They cut each other off. It feels improvised. Can you give us an example of that bebop sound in the text? Sure. In the opening poem, Dream boogie. Listen to the rhythm and the interruption. Good morning, daddy. A cheer. Heard the boogie woogie rumble of a dream deferred. Okay? It's got a swing to it, right? But then he breaks it. Listen closely. You'll hear their feet beating out and beating out of bed. And then another voice cuts in, in italics. You think it's a happy beat, ah, so it's a call and response. It's syncopated. It's a dissonant chord that italicized voice cuts right in questioning the narrative in the middle of the song, it's pure bebop, and that anxiety you think it's a happy beat, it perfectly mirrors what was happening in Harlem at the time. The optimism of the Renaissance was long gone. The Depression had hit hard, the war had happened, and black soldiers came home from fighting.

Unknown Speaker  20:00  
Adding fascism abroad to the same old racism at home, Harlem was becoming a ghetto. The housing was crumbling, jobs were scarce, and that tension culminates in the most famous poem of that collection, Harlem, what happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like A Raisin in the Sun? That image a raisin. It was once a grape full of juice and potential. Now it's shriveled, sweet but dead, or does it explode? And that's the question. Lorraine Hansberry famously takes the Raisin in the Sun line for her play. But Hughes is asking a much more dangerous political question, how long can you tell people to wait before the city burns? And speaking of politics, this is the chapter of Hughes's life that usually gets glossed over in schools because it's inconvenient, very inconvenient. We like Hughes the poet. We're a lot less comfortable with Hughes the radical socialist, but you really can't separate the two. In the 1930s Hughes went hard left, hard left. He was deeply, deeply disillusioned with American capitalism. The Great Depression was absolutely crushing black America. He looked at the Scottsboro Boys case, nine black teenagers falsely accused of rape in Alabama, and he saw the American legal system as a complete sham. So he looked for an alternative. He looked to the Soviet Union. He travels there in 1932 to make a film, which falls apart, but he stays for a while. He spends a year traveling through Soviet central Asia's Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and he was genuinely impressed. He wrote about walking onto a bus in Tashkent and being able to sit wherever he wanted. He saw a society that, at least on the surface, had officially outlawed racism. There is no Jim Crow on the trams in Tashkent. He wrote for a man from Missouri that was incredibly seductive, and he wrote some incredibly fiery poetry during this period, poems like goodbye Christ, or one more s in the USA. These were not subtle. No goodbye Christ, basically says, Jesus, you've been sold out to the capitalists and the rich make way for Marx Lenin push carts and bread. It was incendiary, and it would come back to haunt him big time, because fast forward to the 1950s the Cold War is freezing over. Senator Joseph McCarthy is hunting for communists under every bed, and Langston Hughes, with his Soviet travel logs and his radical poems, is walking around with a giant target on his back. In March of 1953 the subpoena arrives. He is summoned to appear before McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Now we really need to understand the stakes here. The stakes were everything his friend and contemporary the great Paul Robeson had refused to back down. He told the committee off and what happened to him. They revoked his passport, blacklisted him from every concert hall, and completely destroyed his livelihood. Hughes watched that happen. He knew he was fighting for his professional survival. So how did he play it? I know there were two hearings, a private one and then a public one, and this is a fascinating, tactical split in the private executive session. The transcripts, which were only released 50 years later, show a defiant Hughes. What was he saying? McCarthy is pushing him on why his books are in American Libraries overseas, and Hughes argues back. He says, essentially, my books show the truth of American life, the good and the bad. If you ban them, you're acting like the fascists we just fought a war against. He was combative. He was lawyerly. He held his ground, but then comes the public hearing. The cameras are rolling, the press is there, and Hughes completely switches tactics. He decides to play the role of the naive poet. When McCarthy grills him on the poem, goodbye Christ, Hughes doesn't defend the politics. He says it was an ironic poem. I was young, I was angry. I don't believe that anymore. He throws his past self under the bus. He does. He separates his radical past from his patriotic present. He denied being a member of the Communist Party, which was technically true. He never carried a card, but he acquiesced to McCarthy's narrative that his earlier work was a youthful mistake that must have been humiliating for him. It was a forced compromise, as his biographer Arnold Rampersad puts it, the hard left. Felt he sold out. But you have to look at the result. Hughes kept his passport. He kept his speaking engagements. He survived to write for another 15 years. He chose the long game he did, and part of that long game was shifting his critique of America into a safer, more subtle vessel. And this is where his greatest character comes in, simple Jesse B simple explain simple to us, for anyone who hasn't read him, simple is a fictional character in a weekly column. Hughes wrote for the Chicago Defender, a major black newspaper. He's a working class guy from Harlem. He likes his beer. He has trouble with women, and he hangs out at a bar talking to the narrator of the column. And the narrator is a more educated sort of Hughes, like figure, right? It's the classic Socratic dialog, but it's set in a Harlem dive bar, and through the character of simple, Hughes could say things about race and white people that he could no longer say in his own voice without getting subpoenaed again, like what? Give us an example. There's a great column where simple is talking about the new.

Unknown Speaker  25:00  
Threat of the atomic bomb. The narrator is all worried and simple. Just scoffs. He says he's not afraid of the atom bomb because he's already living in a danger zone just by being black in America. And then he says the line, he says, I have been under an atom bomb all my life. It is named white folks.

Unknown Speaker  25:19  
That is so sharp, the bomb is named white folks. It's funny, but it's also devastatingly true. And because it was humor, because it was framed in dialect, the white establishment mostly ignored it, but black readers across the country knew exactly what he was doing. He was keeping the fire alive, just banking the coals so they wouldn't burn the whole house down.

Unknown Speaker  25:40  
So he survives McCarthy. He moves into the 1960s and this is the connection that really just blew my mind when I was digging into the research for this. We tend to separate the Harlem Renaissance from the civil rights movement like they're two different chapters, right? But Hughes is the bridge. Specifically, he is the silent partner in Martin Luther King Jr's rhetoric the watermark theory, a scholar named W Jason Miller has done this incredible work showing that if you hold King's sermons up to the light, you can see Langston Hughes's poetry underneath. Let's look at the evidence. King's I Have a Dream speech. We all know it. But where did that dream imagery come from? It didn't just appear out of nowhere. In 1963

Unknown Speaker  26:22  
King began preaching about broken dreams and shattered dreams as early as 1959 and in those early sermons, he is practically quoting Hughes's dream deferred palm. He's riffing on it. He's sampling it. And they knew each other, right? This wasn't just king reading a book in isolation. No, they were correspondents. In 1960 King wrote to Hughes personally, asking him to write a poem for an SCLC event. Coretta Scott King was a huge fan of his work. King traveled with Hughes poetry books, so when King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he was channeling a literary tradition that Langston Hughes had spent 40 years building. Hughes wrote, I dream a world where man no other man will scorn. King took that poetry and turned it into a national sermon. It's a direct lineage. It's incredible. But even as Hughes is influencing King, there's a new generation of black writers rising up the Black Arts Movement, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and they have a complicated relationship with Uncle Langston. It was the classic generational clash. The Black Arts Movement was militant. They were angry. They used profanity in their work. They wanted to burn it all down to them, Hughes was an elder statesman, which they respected, but he was also a bit soft, a little too polite, exactly. They respected him for opening the door, but they didn't like that he knocked so politely before he did it, and Hughes didn't love their style either, did he? He thought the cursing was gratuitous. He famously said something like, poems are like manure. They're better when you spread them around, not when you pile them up. He thought they were just piling up the anger without the craft. But and this is to his credit, he never turned his back on them, never he went to their plays. He published their work in anthologies. He edited. He remained the bridge, even if he didn't want to cross all the way over to their side. He was also looking outward again. In his final years, he did a lot of translation work, and this was also controversial, which seems to be a theme in his life. He translated Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean Nobel Prize winner and the critics, mostly white. Critics, savaged him for it. They asked, What business does a black poet from Harlem have translating a Chilean woman, which is just racism dressed up as literary criticism 100% Yeah. And Hughes response was perfect. He basically said, Well, none of you were translating her. I'm the only one who cared enough to actually do the work. He saw the connection. He believed the black American experience was connected to the Latin American experience, to the African experience. He was a globalist to the very end, and the end came on, May 22 1967

Unknown Speaker  28:53  
he goes in for prostate surgery. There are complications, and he passes away. The funeral was a jazz funeral. Do Ellington's do nothing till you hear from me, was played perfect. But his final resting place, I've been to the Schomburg Center in Harlem, and if you walk into the lobby, you might be standing on top of him and not even realize it. It's one of the most beautiful and fitting memorials I know of. His ashes are interred under the floor of the main lobby of the Schomburg Center for Research in black culture. It's under a cosmogram, a piece of art in the floor, yes, a celestial design called rivers. And there's an inscription spiraling out from the center. It's a line from that very first masterpiece he wrote on the train when he was just a teenager. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. It's completely full circle. The boy on the train becomes the foundation, literally the foundation of the great library of black history in Harlem. It symbolizes exactly what he was. He is the bedrock. You can't walk into that library without walking over Langston Hughes. He supports the entire structure of black literature that came after him. It's beautiful. So as we wrap up, we've seen the arc.

Unknown Speaker  30:00  
Tech, the traveler, the radical, the survivor. But I want to leave our listeners with one final provocative thought from Hughes. It's a short, sharp poem called dinner guest me. Oh, this one stings. It's so good. It's about being the token black guest at a rich white dinner party, something he must have experienced 1000 times. He writes to be a problem on Park Avenue at eight is not so bad. Solutions to the problem, of course, wait, wow, it just cuts right through all the performative allyship, doesn't it? It really does. And I think that's the question Hughes leaves us with today, in a world where we love to celebrate firsts and we talk constantly about representation in movies and on corporate boards. Are we actually looking for solutions, or are we just inviting the problem to dinner because it makes very interesting conversation? Are we consuming the culture, or are we committed to changing the structure? Hughes knew the difference, and he never let us forget it. Never something to think about. If you want to get deeper into his head, don't just read the famous poems. Pick up his autobiography, The Big C. It reads like an incredible adventure novel. Or listen to a recording of montage of a dream deferred and try to hear that bebop rhythm we were talking about absolutely go find the deep cuts. That's where the real man is. Thanks for listening to the deep dive. We'll catch you on the next one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai