We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as
we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain,
free within ourselves. Wow. I mean, that's not
just a beautiful line of poetry. No. That is
the sound of an entire generation, you know,
finding its voice. That's Langston Hughes basically
laying down a new law. A declaration of independence.
Exactly. A cultural and an aesthetic one, all
rolled into this one just... Magnificent sentence.
And that quote, that manifesto, really, it just
perfectly sets the stage for the man we're diving
into today, James Mercer Langston Hughes. And
he was so much more than just a poet. Oh, absolutely.
He was a novelist, a playwright, a really effective
social activist, a columnist. He even wrote operas.
Maybe most importantly, he was the key innovator
of what we now call jazz poetry. He really was
the voice of the Harlem Renaissance. He defined
it. And what's so fascinating, looking through
the sources we have for you, and it's a huge
stack of biographical, literary, historical information,
is how you can trace that voice all the way back.
Back through generations. Yes. So our mission
for this deep dive is it's to move beyond the
simple biography. We really want to uncover the
specific cultural, political and personal influences
that made Hughes the people's poet. So not just
what he wrote, but why he wrote it that way.
Exactly. How his lonely, frankly complicated
globetrotting life shaped his commitment to showing
the real unvarnished lives of working class black
Americans. OK, so let's start with a core nugget
then, because his sheer output is just staggering.
I mean, he was. Unbelievably productive. He really
was. Not just in different genres. You said it.
Novels, operas, essays, kids books. But his dedication
to just being part of the public conversation.
And that's the key thing, isn't it? He wasn't
some artist locked away in an attic. Not at all.
And the best piece of data on that is his column
in the Chicago Defender. He had an influential
weekly opinion column in this major black newspaper
for 20 years. 20 years. From 1942 all the way
to 1962. It's incredible. That's... I mean, that's
not just a literary figure. That's a journalist.
That's a political commentator writing week in,
week out. That must have shaped how he thought.
Absolutely. It forced him to be relevant, to
be accessible, to be connected to the daily worries
and hopes of his readers right through the rise
of the civil rights movement. That is what separated
him from so many of his more academic contemporaries.
He was always writing for the people. And that
sense of duty, that staying power. It turns out
it has these incredibly deep roots in his family
history. This is where the deep dive gets really
illuminating. It connects him right away to the
very heart of the American struggle, you know,
the central conflict of it. Hughes had mixed
ancestry, like many African -Americans, but the
specifics of his family tree are just so revealing.
Let's start with his paternal side because it
really embodies that conflict. Both of his paternal
great -grandmothers were enslaved Africans. Right.
And both of his paternal great grandfathers were
white slave owners in Kentucky. So his own bloodline
contains the entire power dynamic of the country
right there, the oppressor and the oppressed.
And he claims some pretty specific connections,
too. He said one of those great grandfathers
was related to the statesman Henry Clay. The
other, he claimed, was a Jewish slave trader.
And whether those claims are, you know, 100 percent
verifiable or not, the story he's telling is
clear. His family was tied up in the economic
engine of slavery and white power. But then you
look at his mother's side of the family, and
the story just completely flips on its head.
It becomes a story of radical activism, of liberation.
His maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson, was
mixed race, and she was one of the very first
women to go to Oberlin College. Which was a pioneering
institution. A hub for abolitionism. And Mary's
life was defined by that fight. Her first husband,
Louis Sheridan Leary. He died fighting alongside
John Brown. At Harper's Ferry. Yes. He was fatally
wounded at John Brown's infamous raid in 1859.
That's not just a historical footnote. It's a
direct bloody link to the most radical moment
of the abolitionist movement. After Leary's death,
Mary married Charles Henry Langston. That's where
Hughes gets his name. And Charles Langston was
just as committed. He and his brother, John Mercer
Langston, were leaders of the Ohio Anti -Slavery
Society. They were major figures. And after the
Civil War, Charles moved to Kansas. And just
kept fighting. He worked for voting rights, for
civil rights, for African -Americans. This family
was at the very center of the struggle. So you
have the man who would write the manifesto for
the Harlem Renaissance, literally descending
from the people who led the charge for abolition
a generation before. He carried that legacy in
his name. But his actual childhood, despite those
heroic roots, was... It was really difficult.
Incredibly unstable, yeah, and lonely. He grew
up in these small Midwestern towns, Joplin, Missouri,
Lawrence, Kansas. His parents divorced very early
on. And his father, James Hughes, he basically
just left the country. He went to Cuba, then
Mexico to escape American racism. And that left
a huge hole in Langston's life, emotionally and
financially. He was raised mostly by his grandmother,
Mary Langston. The same grandmother with that
incredible activist history. Exactly. And she
was the one who instilled in him what he called
a lasting sense of racial pride. She told him
the stories, she passed on the oral tradition,
and she taught him he had a duty to his race.
So that's why he always identified with the working
class black experience, not the striving middle
class. It's the foundation of everything. And
during that lonely time, books became his lifeline.
They were his escape. I love how he described
it in his autobiography. He wrote, Then it was
that books began to happen to me, where if people
suffered, they suffered in beautiful language,
not in monosyllables as we did in Kansas. Wow,
that's it, isn't it? The difference between chaotic,
silent suffering and suffering that's given dignity
and shape through language, that's the core of
his entire artistic mission right there. And
his own poetic career got a... Well, a slightly
strange start. He was elected class poet in grammar
school in Lincoln, Illinois. Yeah, and he was
very cynical about why. He said he was a victim
of a stereotype. There were only two black kids
in his class. And the teacher kept talking about
rhythm and poetry. Right. So he said that other
kids just thought, well, everyone knows all Negroes
have rhythm, so they elected me as class poet.
It's such a sharp observation for a kid to make.
He takes this personal moment and immediately
sees the social structure behind it. He saw that
the very thing they stereotyped him for, rhythm,
would become the heart of his art. Then in high
school in Cleveland, he really started to find
his footing. He had a supportive teacher, Helen
Maria Chestnut. And he was writing constantly
for the school paper, the yearbook. And that's
where he wrote his first piece of jazz poetry,
When Sue Wears Red. So the seeds were already
being planted in Cleveland long before he ever
got to Harlem. The whole foundation was being
laid piece by piece in the Midwest. Okay, so
that takes us from his childhood to the next
major turning point. The conflict with his father
that, funnily enough, is what gets him to New
York. Yeah, this fight with his father, James
Hughes, was about so much more than just a career
choice. It was a clash of identities. His father,
having fled the U .S., really disliked his own
race. Which Langston just couldn't understand.
No. He had been raised on this lasting sense
of racial pride. He wrote, I didn't understand
it because I was a Negro and I liked Negroes
very much. It's such a fundamental difference.
And his father was, by all accounts, just a cold
and uncharitable man. He wanted Langston to study
engineering, something practical and far away
from the arts. So Hughes goes to live with him
in Mexico for a bit in 1919 and 1920, trying
to get him to pay for college. But his father
just would not support his dream of being a writer.
So they strike this. This compromise. A deal
made under duress, it sounds like. Completely.
The father agrees to pay for college, but only
if he goes to Columbia University and studies
engineering. So for Hughes, Columbia wasn't about
the Ivy League prestige. It was a ticket to New
York, a ticket to be near Harlem. That's all
it was. So he enrolls in 1921. And he's a good
student. He gets a B -plus average. He's even
publishing poetry secretly in the school paper.
But the whole thing, the engineering, it wasn't
him. And Columbia itself was a hostile environment.
He dropped out in 1922, and he was very clear
why. Racial prejudice among students and teachers.
He couldn't even get a room on campus at first
because he was black. Right. The whole atmosphere
was cold and exclusionary, especially compared
to the vibrant life he saw happening just a few
blocks away in Harlem. The music, the energy,
the culture. So Columbia. which was supposed
to launch this engineering career his father
wanted, actually just pushed him right into the
arms of Harlem. It did, and that led to what
he called his wanderer years. From 23 to 25,
he really went out and saw the world. He did
all sorts of jobs. I mean, he was a crewman on
a tramp steamer, the SS Malone. Which took him
to West Africa and Europe. This gave him a truly
global view of the African diaspora long before
most people were thinking that way. He spent
some time in Paris, had a romance there, worked
as a dishwasher. He was living the life of an
expatriate artist. And when he came back to the
U .S., he kept doing this mix of jobs. For a
while, he was an assistant to the historian Carter
G. Woodson. A pretty prestigious job. But it
took up all his time. It kept him from writing.
So he quits. And he takes a job as a busboy at
a hotel in Washington, D .C. Which seems like
a step down, but it turns out to be the move
that launches his career. Yes, the legendary
discovery story. He was already getting published,
but this is what made him famous. The poet, Rachel
Lindsay, was eating at the hotel. And Hughes
just left some of his poems next to Lindsay's
plate. He did. And Lindsay was so impressed,
not just by the poems, but by the story. This
brilliant young black poet discovered working
as a busboy. He told everyone. It's a perfect
story. It created a huge buzz. And that publicity
finally gave him some stability. He was able
to enroll at Lincoln University, a historically
black university. And he finally got his B .A.
in 1929. before heading right back to Harlem,
which would become his home. His true home. So
he arrives in Harlem with the degree, the reputation,
the experience, the timing is perfect. And his
poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, which he wrote
when he was just 19, had already cemented his
place. It's still his signature poem. It was
first published in 1921 in The Crisis, the NAACP's
magazine. And the poem is just epic. in its scope.
It connects the Black experience across thousands
of years, from the Euphrates and the Congo to
the Mississippi. And that last line, my soul
has grown deep like the rivers, became his epitaph.
It's so powerful. And the fact that the crisis
polished him so much shows how tied he was to
the civil rights movement from the very beginning.
And he wasn't working alone, of course. He was
a central figure, a leader, alongside people
like Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, County
Cullen. A whole collective. They even started
their own literary magazine, Fire. It was short
-lived. But so influential. Because they weren't
just writing nice poems. They were fighting an
ideological battle. A huge one. especially against
the established black middle class, the black
bourgeoisie. Who they felt were trying to be
too... Exactable, exactly. Hughes and his friends
wanted to write about the low life, the real,
unvarnished, sometimes messy lives of working
class black people. They wanted to use jazz and
blues rhythms, the folk culture. And they criticized
the prejudices within the black community, the
colorism, the classism. All of it. And this whole
artistic mission needed a declaration. It needed
a manifesto. Which came in 1926 with his... This
is one of the most important documents of the
era. He's basically saying the racial mountain
isn't white people. It's the desire within black
artists to want to be white, to conform to white
standards of art. To climb that mountain is to
lose yourself. Right. And he argues they have
to reject that completely. And the end of that
essay. It's the quote we started with. It's just
a powerful declaration of self -worth and artistic
freedom. Let's hear it again because it really
is the cornerstone. He says, Their displeasure
doesn't matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain free within ourselves.
It still gives you chills. I mean, that is a
generation claiming its power. And everything
he wrote after that flows from this idea. Pride
and black identity, cultural nationalism, and
using jazz and blues as the actual structure
of his poetry. When we say jazz poetry. What
does that actually mean on the page? It means
using syncopation, repetition, call and response,
trying to capture the improvisational feel of
the music in words. In a poem like The Weary
Blues, he's using rhythm and dialect to elevate
the everyday pain and beauty of black life into
high art. And his mission was always so clear.
He said he wanted to explain and illuminate the
Negro condition in America and obliquely that
of all humankind. It was a universal message
rooted in a specific experience, and that influence
went global. His work was a huge inspiration
for the negritude movement in France. With writers
like Leopold Sider -Senghor? Yes, who became
the first president of Senegal. They saw Hughes
as a model for how to use art for cultural pride
and political resistance. He gave them a template.
So his aesthetic was born in Harlem, but his
understanding of the full Black American experience,
that wasn't complete yet. His early view of the
South, for instance, was pretty flawed. That's
right. Before he'd actually spent time there,
he was influenced by some of the negative stereotypes
common in the North. His 1922 poem, The South,
actually calls the people lazy and stupid. It's
kind of shocking to hear. It is. But that view
was about to be completely transformed. In 1927,
he takes this pivotal trip down south. This is
funded by his patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason.
Right, his godmother, as he called her. And she
wanted him to go collect folk songs and stories,
almost like an anthropologist. She was interested
in what she saw as this, you know, pure, primitive
African culture. But Hughes had a different goal.
He wanted to learn about the lives of people
of color in the South. on their own terms. And
the trip was a revelation for him. It was a shock.
He was, in his words, astonished by the way people
of color endured racism and their life conditions.
His perspective shifted from stereotype to deep,
deep admiration. And this trip is also where
he partners up with Zora Neale Hurston. They
met in Mobile, Alabama. And the key detail here
is that Zora had a car. Which was a huge deal
for a Black person trying to travel in the segregated
South. A game changer. So they decided to travel
together, this amazing team, documenting folk
songs, local dialects, everything. They visited
Tuskegee. They met other writers. And the material
they gathered was just priceless. He met the
blues singer Bessie Smith. He met an escaped
prisoner from a chain gang. These real, raw experiences
went directly into his work. They inspired his
first novel, Not Without Laughter, which won
a major award. And it also led to the play he
wrote with Hurston, Mule Bone. Which became a
source of major conflict. A huge conflict. That
play is actually what destroyed their friendship.
They had a bitter dispute over authorship and
money. And their patron, Mason, was involved
in that too. She was. It's a really sad story
about how financial pressure and ego could just
tear these brilliant collaborations apart. And
his relationship with his patron, Mason, also
eventually fell apart. It did. He broke with
her because she was just too controlling. She
wanted him to be her. her pet primitive, writing
only about the folk culture she found exotic.
She didn't want him writing about modern urban
political life. And he chose his artistic freedom
over her money. He did, which is a testament
to his integrity. But his collaboration with
his best friend, Arne Bontemps, that one lasted
his whole life. They edited this monumental anthology
together, The Poetry of the Negro. So as Hughes
is maturing and the Great Depression is hitting,
his work becomes more and more political. It
does. And our sources are very clear that his
attraction to communism wasn't really about,
you know, reading dense theory. It was more practical.
It was emotional. He said his interest was born
out of my own need. Communism, at least on paper,
offered an alternative to segregated America.
It preached racial equality and international
brotherhood. Which American democracy was not
delivering. Not at all. And this attraction led
him on this incredible adventure in 1932. He
was invited to the Soviet Union with a group
of other black Americans to make a film about
race in the U .S. A propaganda film? A propaganda
film, yeah. And the film never got made, but
Hughes used the trip brilliantly. He traveled
all through the Soviet Union into parts of Central
Asia that were totally closed to Westerners.
And seeing people of color there, treated with
a level of dignity he never saw at home. That
must have been powerful. It was deeply impactful.
And the reason the film got canceled is fascinating.
The writer, Arthur Koestler, who was a friend
of his, said the Soviets dropped it because they
had just gotten official diplomatic recognition
from the U .S. And they didn't want to rock the
boat. they needed to tone down the anti -American
propaganda. So Hughes' film was a casualty of
high -level politics. He also worked as a war
correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. For
the Baltimore Afro -American, yeah. He was in
Madrid broadcasting live, reporting on the fight
against fascism, which he saw as connected to
the fight for racial justice everywhere. And
then when World War II starts, he was initially
hesitant to support black involvement. Well,
yeah. The hypocrisy was glaring. Why go fight
for freedom abroad when you don't have it at
home? But he eventually came around to supporting
the war. With a specific strategy in mind. Yes.
He became a huge champion of the Double V campaign.
Victory over fascism abroad and victory over
Jim Crow at home. That became a powerful rallying
cry for the whole post -war civil rights movement.
It really did. But this long history of left
-leaning associations. It eventually caught up
with him. The McCarthy hearings. McCarthy hearings
in 1953. He was called to testify before Senator
Joseph McCarthy's committee. It was an incredibly
dangerous moment. A career ending moment for
many people. Absolutely. And Hughes had to be
very, very careful. He stuck to his line that
his interest in communism was emotional, not
theoretical. He basically said he hadn't read
the books. He just felt the injustice. And there's
evidence that this pressure worked. He'd been
through a secret, intimidating interrogation.
before the public hearing. Right. And after he
testified, he very clearly and strategically
distanced himself from his more radical past.
And you can see it in his work. Oh, definitely.
When he put together his selected poems in 1959,
he left out all of his radical socialist poems
from the 1930s. Which angered some people on
the left. It did. They saw it as a betrayal.
But for Hughes, it was likely a matter of survival.
He had to make that choice to keep his career,
to keep being able to work at all. OK, so moving
from that very public political pressure to something
much more private. Let's talk about the debate
around his sexuality. Yeah, this is something
academics have discussed for a long time. The
consensus is that he remained closeted his entire
life. And the reasons for that were practical.
Very practical. He relied on the support of black
churches, black organizations, the black press.
Institutions that were socially conservative.
Coming out would have been professional suicide.
So what's the evidence that scholars point to?
Well, they see what they call homosexual codes
in some of those poems, like Cafe 3AM. There
are also unpublished poems he wrote to a man
he called Beauty. But his main biographer, Arnold
Rampersad, is a bit more cautious. He is. Rampersad
concluded that Hughes was probably asexual and
passive in his sexual relationships. But he did
note that Hughes found black men sexually fascinating
and preferred them. So it's complex. And the
need for secrecy definitely shaped his public
image. While his poetry was what defined him
for critics, for the general public, especially
later in his career, he was known for one character
above all else. Chessie B. Simple. Simple. Simple.
The creation of Simple was an act of pure genius.
He was this everyday working class guy in Harlem
who would just muse about life. And those musings
ran in his Chicago Defender column for those
20 years. And Simple allowed Hughes to talk about
really serious political things, civil rights,
poverty, racism, but through humor and common
sense. It made the message accessible and it
protected Hughes from backlash. It wasn't Langston
Hughes, the intellectual preacher. It was just
simple talking in a bar. Exactly. And people
loved him. Those columns were collected into
books like Simple Speaks His Mind, and they were
hugely popular. But as the civil rights movement
evolved into the more militant black power era,
Hughes started to seem a little out of step to
the younger generation. Yeah, there was definitely
some tension there. Younger writers like James
Baldwin saw his work as a bit out of date. maybe
too focused on folk culture and not confrontational
enough for the new era. And Hughes had his own
criticisms of them. He did. He found some of
the new writers over -intellectual or vulgar.
He wasn't a fan of the profanity and what he
saw as an over -emphasis on criminality. But
he never stopped being a mentor, did he? Never.
He was always trying to help the next generation.
He discovered Alice Walker. He was always giving
advice, making introductions. He saw himself
as a Negro writer, not the Negro writer. That
humility is really something. It is. And he did
try to bridge that generational gap. His last
book of poetry published after he died was called
The Panther and the Lash. A clear reference to
the Black Power movement. Yes. It was his attempt
to show solidarity, but to do it with his own
unique artistic skill and control, maybe with
less of the raw anger of some of the younger
poets. Hughes died on May 20, 1967. He was 66.
And his final resting place is... It's just perfect.
His ashes are interred under a medallion in the
floor of the Schomburg Center for Research and
Black Culture in Harlem. Right at the entrance.
At the entrance. And the medallion is an African
cosmogram called Rivers. And in the middle of
it is that line from his first great poem. My
soul has grown deep like the rivers. It brings
his entire life full circle. It's an incredible
honor. And the other honors are just, you know,
staggering. The Spingarn Medal, a Guggenheim,
postage stamps, streets named after him. His
influence is just immeasurable. So as we wrap
up this deep dive, you really see a life that...
didn't just witness the 20th century black American
experience. It helped shape it. Absolutely. You
have the abolitionist roots, the lonely childhood
saved by books, the Columbia dropout who finds
his voice in the clubs of Harlem. He becomes
the leader who writes the manifesto for a generation,
telling them to define beauty on their own terms.
And he's the global traveler, the political thinker
who survives McCarthyism by being smarter and
more strategic than his opponents. He spent his
whole life trying to explain and illuminate the
Negro condition. And he wasn't afraid of the
uncomfortable truths, either within the black
community or in America at large. Which brings
us to a final thought for you, the listener.
It's about his legacy today. You have this balance
in his work between embracing the raw folk culture,
the low life, and his later advice to angry young
writers to be skilled. and objective so not just
shout but to create lasting art right so the
question is how does langston hughes life and
work challenge artists today who are tackling
social struggle after mccarthy he could have
just written safe pretty poems for the rest of
his life but he didn't no he took the anger the
black power movement and he he refined it he
distilled it into art that would last like in
the panther and the lash so is the goal to just
reflect the immediate anger of a moment which
is necessary or is it to do what hughes did to
try and create something more lyrical, more enduring,
that illuminates the human condition in a way
that will still speak to people 50 years from
now. He taught us that sometimes the most revolutionary
act isn't a shout. It's an unforgettable rhythm.
And that's something to think about. Indeed.
We'll leave you there, standing on that mountain,
free within yourself, reflecting on the enduring
power of the poet who dreamed America. Thanks
for joining us for The Deep Dive.