Langston hughes family biography

Charlestown is a small Southern Indiana town of about 8, people that is 20 minutes from my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. Part of my duties involved covering the redevelopment of the Indiana Army Ammunition Plant, a former military factory in Charlestown that had been decommissioned and returned to the local municipalities from whom the government had taken land to create the facility.

In the two years that I spent interviewing politicians and residents in Charlestown, not once did the Hughes family or its connection to the area come up. In fact, whenever someone did pitch me a story about local celebrities it was usually blind bluegrass fiddler Michael Cleveland or Travis Meeks, founder of the rock band Days of the New.

As it turns out, the Hughes family has deep roots in both Kentucky and Indiana. Hughes was the child of two Kentucky slaves and both of their fathers were well-known white men in the state. James Nathaniel lived in Louisville long enough to pass the postal civil service exam, although he was never hired by the post office. Countee was adopted by Rev.

One of these young black writers 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. Hughes was drawn to Communism as an alternative to a segregated America.

Langston hughes family biography: James Mercer Langston Hughes (February

An example is the poem "A New Song". InHughes became part of a group of black people who went to the Soviet Union to make a film depicting the plight of African Americans in the United States. Hughes was hired to write the English dialogue for the film. The film was never made, but Hughes was given the opportunity to travel extensively through the Soviet Union and to the Soviet-controlled regions in Central Asia, the latter parts usually closed to Westerners.

In TurkmenistanHughes met and befriended the Hungarian author Arthur Koestlerthen a Communist who was given permission to travel there. As later noted in Koestler's autobiography, Hughes, together with some forty other Black Americans, had originally been invited to the Soviet Union to produce a Soviet film on "Negro Life", [ 81 ] but the Soviets dropped the film idea because of their success in getting the US to recognize the Soviet Union and establish an embassy in Moscow.

This entailed a toning down of Soviet propaganda on racial segregation in America. Hughes and his fellow Blacks were not informed of the reasons for the cancellation, but he and Koestler worked it out for themselves. Hughes also managed to travel to China, [ 83 ] Japan, [ 84 ] and Korea [ 85 ] before returning to the States. Hughes's poetry was frequently published in the CPUSA newspaper and he was involved in initiatives supported by Communist organizations, such as the drive to free the Scottsboro Boys.

Partly as a show of support for the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War[ 86 ] in Hughes traveled to Spain [ 87 ] as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and other various African-American newspapers. He was more of a sympathizer than an active participant. He signed a statement supporting Joseph Stalin 's purges and joined the American Peace Mobilization in working to keep the U.

Hughes initially did not favor black American involvement in the war because of the persistence of discriminatory U. Jim Crow laws and racial segregation and disfranchisement throughout the South. He came to support the war effort and black American participation after deciding that war service would aid their struggle for civil rights at home. They provided a foundation for nontheistic participation in social struggle.

Hughes was accused of being a Communist by many on the political right, but he always denied it. When asked why he never joined the Communist Party, he wrote, "it was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept. He stated, "I never langston hughes family biography the theoretical books of socialism or communism or the Democratic or Republican parties for that matter, and so my interest in whatever may be considered political has been non-theoretical, non-sectarian, and largely emotional and born out of my own need to find some way of thinking about this whole problem of myself.

He moved away from overtly political poems and towards more lyric subjects. When selecting his poetry for his Selected Poems he excluded all his radical socialist verse from the s. On May 22,Hughes died in the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City at the age of 66 from langston hughes families biography after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer.

His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the foyer of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. 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". Harry Burleigh set the poem "Lovely, dark, and lonely one" from the collection The Dream Keeper and Other Poems [ 98 ] to music in[ 99 ] his last art song.

Italian composer Mira Sulpizi set Hughes's text to music in her song "Lyrics". Hughes's life has been portrayed in film and stage productions since the late 20th century. In Looking for LangstonBritish filmmaker Isaac Julien claimed him as a black gay icon—Julien thought that Hughes's sexuality had historically been ignored or downplayed.

Spike Lee 's film Get on the Busincluded a black gay character, played by Isaiah Washingtonwho invokes the name of Hughes and punches a homophobic character, saying: "This is for James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. Hughes's Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazzwritten inwas performed for the first time in March with specially composed music by Laura Karpman at Carnegie Hallat the Honor festival curated by Jessye Norman in celebration of the African-American cultural legacy.

The novel Harlem Mosaics by Whit Frazier depicts the friendship between Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and tells the story of how their friendship fell apart during their collaboration on the play Mule Bone. Hughes's work continues to have a major readership in contemporary China. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read View source View history.

Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. American writer and social activist — For other uses, see Langston Hughes disambiguation. Poet columnist dramatist essayist novelist. Representation in other media. Poetry collections. Novels and short story collections. Library resources about Langston Hughes.

Resources in your library Resources in other libraries. By Langston Hughes Resources in your library Resources in other libraries. The New York Times. Retrieved August 9, Kansas History. Retrieved May 24, Retrieved December 15, African-Native American Scholars. Archived from the original on August 15, Retrieved July 30, Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories.

They worked, schemed, or fought. But no crying. Rampersad, vol. Wirth Collection Emory University. Central High. Retrieved February 1, — via Hathi Trust. Chesnutt —Black Latinist". Retrieved February 1, May 23, Retrieved June 20, And the father, Hughes said, 'hated Negroes. I think he hated himself, too, for being a Negro. He disliked all of his family because they were Negroes.

Langston Hughes: The Harlem Renaissance. Marshall Cavendish. ISBN Retrieved February 11, Retrieved May 1, Hughes never publicly identified "F. Nine years older than Hughes, Smith influenced the poet to go to sea. Born in Jamaica inSmith spent most of his life as a ship steward and political activist at sea—and later in New York as a resident of Harlem.

Smith was deported in to Jamaica for alleged Communist activities and illegal alien status. Hughes corresponded with Smith up until the latter's death in Berry, p. Archived from the original on March 2, Retrieved March 3, He continued to write and publish poetry and prose during this time, and inhe published his first collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks.

Inhe served as a war correspondent for several American newspapers during the Spanish Civil War. Also around this time, Hughes began contributing a column to the Chicago Defenderfor which he created a comic character named Jesse B. In the late s, Hughes contributed the lyrics for a Broadway musical titled Street Scenewhich featured music by Kurt Weill.

The success of the musical earned Hughes enough money that he was finally able to buy a house in Harlem. Around this time, he also taught creative writing at Atlanta University today Clark Atlanta University and was a guest lecturer at a university in Chicago for several months. Over the next two decades, Hughes continued his prolific output.

Langston hughes family biography: His parents separated soon after

Inhe wrote a play that inspired the opera Troubled Island and published yet another anthology of work titled The Poetry of the Negro. It opens:. Mixing story and song, Tambourines tells the story of two female street preachers in Harlem whose success allows them to open up a church. Hughes told The New York Times he tried to sell the play to producers for a couple of years, eventually adapting the story into a novel—his second.

It published in and received acclaim, garnering new interest in a stage production. Hughes never married, nor was he romantically linked to any of the women in his life.

Langston hughes family biography: His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and

On May 22,Hughes died from complications of prostate cancer at age A tribute to his poetry, his funeral contained little in the way of spoken eulogy but was filled with jazz and blues music. In Hughes began studying at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. Hughes graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in and became a Doctor of Letters in He was also given an honorary doctorate by Howard University.

Langston Hughes sometimes went out with women, but he never married. People who have studied his life and poetry are sure that he was homosexual. In the s it was harder to be open about being gay than it is nowadays. His poetry has lots of symbols which are used by other homosexual writers. Hughes thought that men who had very dark skin were particularly beautiful.

It seems from his poetry that he was in love with an African-American man. He also wrote a story which might tell of his own experience.

Langston hughes family biography: Hughes was the child of

Blessed Assurance is the story of a father's anger because his son is "queer" and acts like a girl. Devoted to Younger Negro Artists. Hughes and these friends did not always agree with the ideas of some of the other African-American writers who were also part of the Harlem Renaissance because they thought their ideas were Middle class and that they treated others who had darker skin, less education and less money with discrimination.

All his life, Hughes never forgot the lessons that he learned about poor and uneducated African-Americans in the stories that his grandmother told. Hughes became a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in Hughes became a famous American poet, but he was always ready to help other people, particularly young black writers. He was worried that many young writers hated themselves, and expressed these feelings to the world.

He tried to help people feel pride, and not worry about the prejudice of other people. He also tried to help young African-Americans not to express hatred and prejudice towards white Americans. Hughes wrote:.