Dr. Jim Persoon

Langston Hughes (1902-67) was the leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. His poetry, plays, essays, and stories brought African-American life into white consciousness, integrating jazz and the blues, black folk idiom, and working-class characters into American life. He grew up separated from his mother (a school-teacher) and father (a mixed-race mining engineer who moved to Mexico because he disliked black people, as Hughes recalled), who left him to be raised by his grandmother. She was from a prominent abolitionist family, the Langstons, but was living in reduced circumstances in Lawrence, Kansas (where I went to school).

Of this time, Hughes wrote, "I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas." 

His father paid for Hughes to attend Columbia University to study engineering, but Hughes turned to writing instead, surrounded by the rich cultural life of New York City and the rise of black culture centered in Harlem, including such venues as the club Café Society where Billie Holiday first sang “Strange Fruit.” His career after that is too productive to describe more fully. Some of the works we’ll read are an autobiography, The Big Sea; his essays for the Chicago Defender; his stories in The Ways of White Folks; and of course the poetry.