Hughes, (James Mercer) Langston
Born: February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri
Died: May 22, 1967, in New York, New York
Vocations: Poet, Novelist, Playwright, Short Story Writer, Translator, Editor
Geographic Connection to Pennsylvania: West Chester, Chester County

Keywords: African American Poets; Atlanta University; Columbia University; Harlem Renaissance; “Langston Hughes Place”; Lincoln University; New York; University of Chicago

Abstract: Born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902, James Mercer Langston Hughes was a prolific writer who devoted most of his energies to poetry. Incorporating his personal experiences and Black America’s into his writing, he developed an impressive body of poems, novels, memoirs, plays, and short stories. Such works include his autobiography I Wander as I Wander (1956), and poems The Negro Speaks of River (1921) and The Weary Blues (1926). A 1929 graduate of Lincoln University in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Hughes passed away in New York, from prostate cancer, on May 22, 1967, at the age of 65.

Biography:

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, to Carrie Langston Hughes and James Nathaniel Hughes. At an early age his parents separated. James Hughes moved to Mexico where he prospered, but unfortunately his mother was not so successful. She moved frequently to find better jobs. As a result, Hughes spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, with his grandmother, Mary Langston, a learned woman and a participant in the civil rights movement. Sadly, Mary Langston passed away when Langston was 12. After her death Langston stayed briefly with his mother and her new husband Homer Clark. Clark left town to seek a job elsewhere and Hughes’s mother sent him to live with her mother’s friends “Auntie” and Mr. Reed. In 1915 he rejoined his mother, step-father, and step-brother—Gwyn—in Illinois where the family had relocated. After one year, in 1916, Clark moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio.

After graduating from high school in Cleveland, Ohio, Hughes traveled to Mexico to see his father. On the train ride home he wrote his first poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” published in the African American periodical Crisis in 1921. That same year he published his first play, The Gold Piece.

With the support of his father, Hughes entered Columbia University, in New York, 1921. He was happy about living in Harlem—the thriving black community provided inspiration for his poetry—but unhappy with the University. The following poem is one he wrote while in Harlem:

Negro

I am a Negro:
Black as the night is black,
Black like the depths of my Africa.

I’ve been a slave:
Caesar told me to keep his door-steps clean.
I brushed the boots of Washington.

I’ve been a worker:
Under my hand the pyramids arose.
I made mortar for the Woolworth Building.

I’ve been a singer:
All the way from Africa to Georgia
I carried my sorrow songs.
I made ragtime.

I’ve been a victim:
The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo.
They lynch me now in Texas.

I am a Negro:
Black as the night is black,
Black like the depths of my Africa.

His unhappiness with the university and with his chosen course of studies, engineering, he chose to withdraw—a decision that deeply disappointed his father. After his departure from college he decided to take time and travel, visiting Paris, West Africa, and Italy gaining culture and inspiration for his future works. Later, he returned to the U.S., worked minor jobs, and continued to write poems and prose. At the encouragement of Waring Cuney, a young poet who attended Lincoln University in Chester County, Hughes applied for admission at Cuney’s alma mater. No longer supported by his father, Hughes had to come up with the costly tuition per semester himself. Fortunately for Langston, his poems won him a scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

His enrollment in Lincoln coincided almost exactly with his 24th birthday and the publication of his first volume of poetry. Author Faith Berry cites a quote Hughes made in a letter of his immediate approval of Lincoln University, though partly in jest: “I like Lincoln so much that I expect to be about six years in graduating. I don’t ever want to leave...Out here with the trees and rolling hills and open sky, in old clothe, and this do-as-you-please atmosphere, I rest content. This must be the freest of Negro schools.” At the time of his enrollment the Harlem Renaissance was beginning to peak and it was not easy for Hughes to meet both the demands of his studies and status as a new and immediately popular poet. Accomplished and educated he made it through Lincoln in three and half years, graduating by 1929.

By this time Hughes had become one of the premier young poets and writers of his generation. He became the first black writer that could support himself on his writing, his goal from early in his career. As his poems, prose, plays, and first novel Not Without Laughter written in 1930 were published, he was rising as a leading voice in the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes’s play Mulatto opened in 1935 on Broadway. Adding more to the theatre, during the 1930s to 1940s, he founded numerous black theatre groups in Harlem, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In 1937, he became a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American and traveled to Spain to write on the Spanish Civil War where Ernest Hemingway befriended him and the two would attend bullfights.

In 1942, Hughes moved to Harlem, which became his permanent home; he traveled and lectured immensely at universities across the United States. In 1953, during the era of McCarthyism, he was accused of being a Communist, as were many artists and writers of the time. Some of the poems and works written earlier in his career were deemed controversial and he was summoned to testify before Congress. His testimony simply stated that he was never a Communist and named no names, well aware of blacklisting. Excused from the hearing with good standing, Author Faith Berry notes that “Hughes ultimately emerged from the witch-hunting era with his literary career intact.”

In his elder years, Langston Hughes held posts at the University of Chicago and the University of Atlanta where doctoral dissertations were already being written about him, an impressive honor for a well-lived life. His block in Harlem on East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place” in his honor.

After completing more than 100 works of literature throughout his life, James Mercer Langston Hughes died from complications after surgery for prostate cancer in Polyclinic Hospital in New York, on May 22, 1967.

Works:

Selected Poems

Plays

Fiction

Sources:

This biography was prepared by Joseph J. Kozel, Fall 2004.