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The influence of the poet at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance lives on today

Thursday, January 31, 2002

By Ervin Dyer, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Tomorrow is the birthday of Langston Hughes, the black poet whose graceful verse and prose showcased the spiritual and creative dignity of the lives of African Americans.

Twentieth century writer and poet Langston Hughes

Had he lived, Hughes would be 100. He died in 1967, when national efforts to recognize the contributions of black Americans were still relegated to the second week in February.

It didn't become Black History Month until 1976.

Long before then, however, Hughes captured the joys and pains of the African-American experience in plays, short stories, essays and, especially, poetry. He wrote at least 800 poems and became the most prominent voice among the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s.

He touched artists everywhere.

"He was my heart and soul," said Vernell Lillie of Pittsburgh's Kuntu Repertory Theater.

After hearing Hughes' works while growing up in Texas, Lillie said, she woke up one morning with the poet forever on her mind.

	"Note on Commercial Theatre" by Langston Hughes You've taken my blues and gone -- You sing 'em on Broadway And you sing 'em in Hollywood Bowl, And you mixed 'em up with symphonies And you fixed 'em So they don't sound like me. Yep, you done taken my blues and gone. You also took my spirituals and gone You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones All kinds of Swing Mikados And in everything but what's about me -- But someday somebody'll Stand up and talk about me -- Black and beautiful -- And sing about me, And put on plays about me! I reckon it'll be Me myself! Yes, it'll be me.

His language was lofty and lyrical; his writings political and personal. His themes on race relations, self-love and ancestral connections to Africa were rousing, she said.

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry pondered the same linkages when she penned "Raisin in the Sun." Her title, on the first black play to win a New York Drama Critics Circle award, is a line borrowed from Hughes' poem "Dream Deferred."

Hill District African storyteller Bob Gore remembers meeting Hughes, speaking with him on the phone and visiting his Harlem apartment twice in the 1960s, where they talked of the civil rights movement.

Before there were the exhortations of Jesse Jackson, Gore said, Hughes' work told us we were somebody.

"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame," Hughes said in an article in The Nation. "If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter."

Gore said his grandparents drummed into him that he was a person connected to the world, but it was the words of Hughes that made him know it.

Many agree and feel it is a fitting tribute to have the poet's birthday coincide with the beginning of Black History Month.

For artist Valerie Lawrence of Franklin Park, Hughes' work undergirds the importance of black Americans telling their own stories.

The essence of his work was to be proud of who you are, she said. A hundred years from now, it still will be appreciated.

"It's not in the cobwebs. We still hear the blues," Lawrence said, referring to his poem "Note on Commercial Theatre." "His work is as youthful and as poetic as when he first spoke them."

Hughes was born Feb. 1, 1902, in Joplin, Mo. His father, James Nathaniel Hughes, a businessman and attorney, and his mother, Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, a teacher, divorced when he was young. He spent his early years with his maternal grandmother, the widow of Charles Henry Langston.

	More on Black History Onyx Alliance to spotlight diversity, networking Calendar: Local groups plan wide range of activities, events Your guide to Black History Month, 2002 Bookmark our Black History Month page for current articles, links to previous stories and related Internet resources.

Hughes attended Columbia University to study engineering but dropped out to pursue his writing. He would later graduate from Pennsylvania's Lincoln University.

But his real education came from travels through Europe, Central America and Africa and his long residence in Harlem. He immersed himself in the culture of his people while in Harlem and became the leader of the artistic and literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Still, life for Hughes was no crystal stair.

His views, which some saw as radical and revolutionary, ruptured relationships with friends and patrons. His work was censored. He was labeled a Communist. His passport was taken.

And Hughes was never close to this father, a man some scholars call a self-loathing Negro because he considered blacks ignorant and lazy. And he hated himself for being one.

His son, meanwhile, embraced his American and African heritage -- though never lifting one higher than the other.

In his autobiography, "The Big Sea," Hughes wrote: "I was only an American Negro -- who had loved the surface of Africa and the rhythms of Africa. But I was not Africa. I was Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem."

His work also resonated with the common man, because he managed to show the humanity of their lives.

The power of Hughes' words hoisted writing about black Americans from second-class status, said Vera Hubbard, a Penn Hills writer with the International Poetry Forum.

That point came home to her after she recited Hughes' poetry in an assembly at Central Catholic High School, when some students remarked that for the first time they understood the history of black people.

"Langston did a good job of capturing the life of black people," said Hubbard. "He saw the plain, ordinary folks and saw the beauty in their lives."

Tomorrow and Saturday Anthony Thompson will present "A Birthday Tribute to Langston Hughes" at the Selma Burke Art Gallery at the Kingsley Association, 6118 Penn Circle, East Liberty. Both performances begin at 8 p.m. General admission is $10. For more information, call 412-661-8751..