Langston Hughes and the
Harlem Renaissance.
Langston Hughes was of the Harlem Renaisssance, an artistic movement of the 1920's in which black artists living in Harlem and elsewhere blossomed in musical ,poetic, theatrical and cultural expression. This movement was not automomous, that is, it's success sometimes was dependent upon the financial support of white patrons who influnenced the movement through their expectations. The musical and oral traditions of black America inspired Hughes, and the rhythms of jazz music can be heard in much of his poetry.
Information from It's a Hughes Thang!
About Langston: Langston Hughes was born in Joplin Missouri, in 1902. His father, who had studied to become a lawyer, left for Mexico shortly after the baby was born. When Langston was seven or eight he went to live with his grandmother, who told him wonderful stories about Fredrick Douglas and Sojourner Truth and took him to hear Booker T. Washington. She also introduced him to The Crisis , edited by W.E.B. DuBois. who also wrote The Souls of Black Folk, young Langston's favorite book.
After his grandmother died when he was twelve, Langston went to live with his friends, whom he called Auntie and Uncle Reed . At age fourteen his mother married again and soon he accompanied his new family to Illinois and then to Cleveland. This is where Homer Clarke, his mother's new husband found work at a steel mill.
Langston enter Colombia University and began living in Harlem, at that time and elegant section on the northern end of Manhattan Island that black people were making their own. The sights and sounds of Harlem, its music and dance and intellectual life, inspired Langston more than his classes in mining engineering, and eventually he quit school. Meanwhile he sent more poems to the Crisis . Having difficulty finding work, Hughes, twenty-one, joined the crew of a ship sailing for Africa. Eventually he traveled through Italy, Holland, Spain, and France, writing all the while. Finally he returned to New York, and felt as though he had returned home.
An outburst of literary activity followed. Hughes's poetry absorbed the rhythms of blues and jazz and the dialect of African American speech that he heard around him. He continued to write and publish in the The Crisis . He met poet Vachel Lindsay, who liked his poems and promoted them. In 1926 Hughes published his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, about Harlem life.
Hughes continued writing through the 1930's and the 1940's, speaking for the poor and the homeless black people who suffered during the Great Depression. He wrote of their daily lives in American cities, of their anger and their loves. Black people loved reading his works and hearing him read his poems at public presentations all over the country. To them he was" Harlem's Poem." When Hughes died in 1967, a jazz band played at his funeral.
The Harlem that Hughes loved and where he lived most of his life was an exciting place. This newly developed suburb of New York City was planned, laid out, and built almost too fast; the bottom dropped out of the real estate market in 1904-1905. Harlem had broad boulevards, beautiful town houses, and exclusive apartment buildings-but no residents. Desperate to rent to anyone, many developers began to open Harlem to blacks, and by 1914 Harlem was a black city. Its population almost exploded during the years of the First World War as blacks from the South moved north in search of better jobs and fuller citizenship--the beginning of what came to be known as the Great Migration. At the same time, because it was a port city, New York attracted a large influx of blacks from the West Indies and even Africa. Meanwhile blacks enlisted in the armed forces in record numbers and distinguished themselves on the battlefield in Europe. They also too the sounds of ragtime and jazz to England and France, and caused a sensation.
After the war the combination of the Great Migration, the mix of cultures in Harlem, and a newfound sense of black unity and confidence produced a great burst of creativity. The black writer, educator, and intellectual Alain Locke described a new sense of Negro identity: " Here in Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history so so many diverse elements of Negro life.... In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for groups expression and self-determination. It is--or promises at least to be--a race capital.
Page by Jon Solloway, Alex Bacon, and Matt Muscanell