Langston Hughes

Early Life

James Langston Hughes was an outstanding African American poet who relentlessly fought against racial segregation and significantly contributed to strengthening black consciousness and racial pride among the black people in America, particularly through the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902.

His parents separated shortly after his birth, his father eventually moving to Mexico, ostensibly driven by the contempt he had developed for African Americans whom he saw as having accepted their deprived state in the racially segregated America. Hughes spent his early childhood with his maternal grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. It was an altogether lonely and unhappy life (Lewis, 37). But the caring and inspiring nature of his grandmother, a political activist in her own right, and the love he cultivated for books and reading, made it bearable. After 1914, he lived with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois, and then Cleveland, Ohio. Upon graduation from high school in 1919, he spent a year with his father in Mexico.

Between 1926 and 1929, Hughes studied for a bachelor's degree at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. In 1943, the same university awarded him a doctorate in literature (Lewis, 69).

Writing Career

Hughes began writing poetry early. In high school in Cleveland, where he was elected class poet, qualified for the honor roll, and edited the school yearbook, he read and developed interest in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. These poets, as well as black poets Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Claude McKay, were to exert a great influence on his verse. One of his most memorable and widely anthologized poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” composed soon after he completed school and dedicated to W. E. B. Du Bois, was met with acclaim and was eventually published in The Crisis, the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Like the great rivers of the world, black people's culture will endure and deepen because of the strength of the black soul and imagination, the poem assures (Krasner, 24).

While in Mexico, Hughes learned German and Spanish, and was taught important lessons in the problematic manifestations of race, class, and ethnicity. He concentrated on writing and saw his poems appear regularly in The Crisis and other journals. In 1921, Hughes joined Columbia University to study engineering. Dissatisfied with the course, which he had taken on his father's demand, he left after a year. By that time, he had resolved to live as a writer (Jemie, 15).

Soon after, he joined the merchant marines and traveled widely to Africa, Italy, and France as a cook's helper and doing other menial jobs. While in France, he also worked briefly in a Paris nightclub. It was while at the club that he met Dr. Alain Locke, perceived as the standard-bearer and chief black proponent of the Harlem Renaissance, who recognized his talent and decided to include some of his poems in his influential anthology of African American literature, The New Negro of 1924.

Hughes returned to the United States in late 1924 ...