Langston Hughes

The abolition was in the family before he was. His grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson, was the first Black woman admitted to Oberlin's preparatory department, and in 1858 she married Lewis Sheridan Leary. A year later Leary rode with John Brown to Harpers Ferry and was shot to death there. She married again into the Langstons, an Ohio family that helped run the state antislavery society, and their daughter Carrie bore Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri. His parents split almost immediately, his father going to Cuba and then Mexico to get out from under American racism. In an Illinois grammar school the class elected him poet, which he later explained without sentiment: there were two Black children in the room and the English teacher would not stop talking about rhythm.

Columbia admitted him in 1921 and refused him a room in the dormitories because he was Black. He left after a year, shipped out to West Africa and Europe on a freighter, and came back to publish The Weary Blues in 1926 and take a degree from Lincoln University in 1929. Then four decades of nearly everything — novels, plays, opera libretti, translations, children's books, and the newspaper column that made him a household voice. BriefHistory has the poetry and the Harlem years. What is left over is the price of staying employed as a Black writer in America.

For two years a wealthy white woman in New York who liked to be called Godmother paid his bills and supervised his first novel, and when they broke over what she thought about Black people he was on his own. He took it out on her in a 1939 poem addressed to a patron. The politics cost more. He had published in the Communist press, gone to the Soviet Union for a film never made, reported the Spanish war, and signed a 1938 statement defending Stalin's purges, and in 1953 Joseph McCarthy's subcommittee called him in. He told the senators his political thinking had always been non-theoretical and largely emotional. Then he backed away from the left that had claimed him, and when he assembled his Selected Poems in 1959 he left out every radical verse of the 1930s.

He died on May 22, 1967, after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer. The argument since has mostly been about what he would not say. His principal biographer, Arnold Rampersad, concluded he was probably asexual, other scholars read coded desire through the poems, and Isaac Julien built a film around the question in 1989. Nothing has settled it. What did get settled was smaller and stranger: in 2018 the documentary record established that he was born in 1901, not the 1902 he gave in his own autobiography and that reference books had repeated ever since. His house on East 127th Street became a New York City landmark in 1981 and is a museum now.

Langston Hughes's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Weary Blues book
  His first collection, published three years after he left Columbia 1926
• Not Without Laughter book
  A first novel written under a patron's supervision. It won the Harmon Gold Medal. 1930
• The Ways of White Folks book
  Short stories finished in a Carmel cottage lent to him for a year 1934
• The Big Sea book
  The first volume of memoir — and the source of the wrong birth year 1940
• The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949 book
  Edited with Arna Bontemps 1949
• I Wonder as I Wander book
  The second memoir, covering the Soviet and Spanish years 1956

• June 1920 aged 19 Goes to Mexico to ask his father to pay for Columbia They compromised: Hughes would study engineering so long as he could go to Columbia.
• September 1921 aged 20 Enrolls at Columbia and is refused a room on campus because he is Black
• 1923 aged ~22 Ships out on the S.S. Malone for six months in West Africa and Europe
• 1926 aged ~25 Publishes The Weary Blues
• 1929 aged ~28 Takes a BA from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania
• 1932 aged ~31 Travels to the Soviet Union for a film about Black American life that is never made He stayed on and traveled through Central Asia, meeting Arthur Koestler in Turkmenistan.
• August 1937 aged 36 Broadcasts live from Madrid during the Spanish Civil War He was there as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American.
• 1953 aged ~52 Testifies before Joseph McCarthy's Senate subcommittee He afterward excluded his radical 1930s verse from his Selected Poems.
• May 22, 1967 aged 66 Dies in New York at 66

• Zora Neale Hurston 1891–1960
  Novelist and folklorist whose work preserved Black Southern speech and culture and became central to the American canon. shared a patron with
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. first published him in The Crisis
• Joseph McCarthy 1908–1957
  Senator whose unsupported accusations and investigations gave “McCarthyism” its name and damaged civil liberties. questioned by
• John Brown 1800–1859
  Militant abolitionist whose raid on Harpers Ferry sharpened sectional conflict preceding the Civil War. killed his grandmother's first husband's cause
• James Baldwin 1924–1987
  Essayist and novelist whose searing explorations of race, sexuality, and identity remain profoundly relevant. the generation that followed
• Lorraine Hansberry 1930–1965
  Playwright whose 'A Raisin in the Sun' brought Black family life, housing discrimination, and aspiration to Broadway. named with him as a Black humanist