“Today I go back to the sea
And the wind-beaten rise of the foam.
Today I go back to the sea—
And it’s just as though I were home.
It’s just as though I were home again
On this ship of iron and steam,
And it’s just as though I have found again
The broken edge of a dream.” ~ Langston Hughes
Celebrating a Poet
A birthday is the perfect time to celebrate a person’s life and accomplishments, whether they are among the living or not. February 1st marks the 125th birthday of the poet Langston Hughes who passed away in 1967 at the age of 66, and with February being Black History Month, it couldn’t be a better time to celebrate his life and legacy!
His Heritage & The Makings of a Poet
James Mercer Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri, to Carrie Langston Hughes and James Nathaniel Hughes. Like so many people, Hughes was of mixed ancestry; both his paternal great- grandmothers were enslaved Africans, and both his paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners in Kentucky. Despite his mixed roots, Hughes consciously identified with the African American experience, describing himself as brown and deeply rooted in American soil. His parents divorced when he was young, and he was raised predominantly by his maternal grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston. His father had long since moved to Mexico, hoping to escape the enduring racism of the United States, and his mother Carrie traveled looking for employment
His grandmother, Mary, was nearly 70 years old when he was born, and raised Hughes in Lawrence, Kansas, in an all-Black community where he developed his passion for activism and writing. She instilled in Hughes a great and lasting sense of racial pride. He always identified with the oppressed black people who surrounded him in his life, and his writing would later glorify them and the experience of that time. After his grandmother passed away, Hughes moved in with family friends, then with his mother, Carrie, and her husband in Lincoln, IL. They later settled in Cleveland, OH, but it was in Lincoln where Hughes began writing poetry. During high school in Cleveland, Hughes wrote for the school newspaper, edited the yearbook, and began to write his first short stories, poems, and plays.
A Prolific Writer
Hughes was an exceptionally prolific writer, having written 35 books, including poetry, novels, short stories, and plays. He had 800 published poems and was one of the first African Americans to earn a living solely from his writing. Hughes was a pivotal leader of the Harlem Renaissance, earning him the title known to many as “The People’s Poet”. His writing captured the African American experience, often blending jazz and blues rhythms, and advocating for racial pride and social justice.
His Education
He seldom saw his father growing up, and their relationship was strained, but Hughes did stay with him in Mexico for a brief time before graduating from high school. After he graduated, he returned there hoping to persuade his father to support his plans of attending Columbia University. It was during that time that he wrote his famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. In 1921, it became his first poem to be published. While at Columbia, Hughes maintained a B+ average and wrote and published poetry in the Columbia Daily Spectator under a pen name. He left that college in 1922 due to racial prejudice among the students and faculty. He was denied a room on campus because he was black. It was no wonder he was drawn more to the predominantly African-American Harlem. All the while, he continued writing poetry. He later enrolled at Lincoln University, a historically Black university in Pennsylvania, where he earned a B.A. in 1929, but not before publishing his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues.
His Diverse Work & Travels
His list of jobs was as diverse and colorful as his writing; he worked as a sailor, serving a brief tenure as a crewman aboard the S.S. Malone in 1923, where he visited West Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and Europe, and lived in Paris working in nightclubs. Before establishing his writing career, he worked as a truck farmer, waiter, and doorman. He spent time in England in the early 1920s, where he became part of the black expatriate community that was forming there. It was a diverse group—largely from the U.S.--seeking a better life, safety, and escape from systemic racism. Hughes briefly served as a personal assistant to historian Carter G. Woodson in 1925. This job was demanding and took time from his own writing, so Hughes quit the position to work as a busboy at the Warman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. It was there that Hughes slipped three of his poems to a literary critic dining in the restaurant, a move that helped launch him into a wider literary world.
His Awards
Hughes earned countless awards, including the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Prize, the Harmon Award for literature, the Anisfeld-Wolfe Award, and the NAACP awarded Hughes the Spingarn Medal for distinguished achievements by an African American in 1960. In 1963, Hughes was awarded an honorary doctorate by Howard University. Although he was never an official government-appointed poet laureate, he was widely acclaimed as the “Poet Laureate of Harlem” and a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance.
Music, Poetry, & Hughes
Jazz was a big part of Hughes’s life and his poetry. He spent many nights at nightclubs listening and collaborating with musicians like Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus, where he would hold readings accompanied by jazz combos, and even wrote a children’s book called The First Book of Jazz, opens a new window. He loved the sound of Jazz and was quoted once saying, “But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.” His mixing of poetry with the rhythms and themes of jazz and blues made him a pioneer of jazz poetry. One of his poems that exemplifies his style of blending jazz-influence rhythm, the Black American experience, and amazing imagery is “Harlem” (A Dream Deferred):
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Whether you are a fan of jazz, poetry, or both, I think it is hard not to find something to love in the lyrical, strong, and poignant poetry that Hughes provided the world. Although he has been gone now for over fifty years, his poetry and legacy still have a strong impact on readers and poets alike. Poets like Sonia Sanchez, Jason Reynolds, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa have all noted how his influence has inspired their writing.
To learn more about Langston Hughes: Gale In Context Biography
Books by Langston Hughes
The Collected Works of Langston Hughes
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