By James Aitchison

Langston Hughes, the Poet Laureate of African America, had a great ear for rhythms and stress, able to propel ideas and demands for racial justice through urgent jagged verse, a “jazz” poet who harnessed popular music such as ragtime, swing, boogie-woogie and be-pop to express conflict and nuance in his poetry.

And he asked one of American poetry’s most famous questions: what happens to a dream deferred? 

The “American dream”, denied to so many African Americans and immigrants, became Hughes’s cause célèbre.  Hughes championed those on the margins of American society,

those whose lives were diminished by a history of slavery, colonial exploitation, and what Hughes once called “the unmitigated gall of white imperialism”.

His poem Harlem first appeared in 1951:

     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?

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry took a line from the poem as the title of her play, A Raisin in the Sun, which later became a movie with Sidney Poitier.  Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr was also influenced by Hughes’s work, claiming “I am personally the victim of deferred dreams”.  His famous “I Have a Dream” speech resonates with the poet’s vision of racial equality.

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1901.  His ancestry included African slaves, white slave owners, and a Jewish slave trader.  His maternal grandmother was of African American, French, English and Native American descent.  She raised Hughes in Kansas, instilling in him a lasting sense of racial pride.  He glorified the neglected and downtrodden, and discovered what he called “the wonderful world of books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables as we did in Kansas”.

Hughes experimented with writing and was elected class poet in grammar school.  As he observed, “Our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry.  Well, everyone knows, except us, that all Negroes have rhythm.”

Clearly influenced by the most original of American poets, Walt Whitman, and Carl Sandburg,

Hughes developed a unique, music-inflected voice.  His first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926.  It included his signature poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers:

     My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

     I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

     I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

     I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it…

In his poem Negro, Langston Hughes evoked historical horrors:

     I’ve been a victim:

          The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo.

          They lynch me still in Mississippi… 

In The Black Clown, Hughes combined humorous defiance with frantic humiliation.  His monologue was intended to be spoken by a “pure-blooded Negro in the white suit and hat of a clown, to the music of a piano, or an orchestra”:

     You laugh

     Because I’m poor and black and funny —

     Not the same as you —

     Because my mind is dull

     And dice instead of books will do…

As the monologue climaxes, the performer discards his clown suit to reveal he proudly wears the clothes of a modern man:

     Cry to the world

     That all might understand:

     I was once a black clown

     But now —

     I’m a man!

Hughes published plays, novels, short stories, essays, autobiographies, histories, and libretti, but the writing of poetry remained his sacred commitment.  He stood for cultural nationalism; he fought to suppress black self-hate.  For him, racial consciousness was a source of undying inspiration.  In My People, he strove to elevate the black aesthetic:

     The night is beautiful,

     So the faces of my people.

     The stars are beautiful,

     So the eyes of my people…

Believing that “Freedom is just frosting on someone else’s cake”, he demonstrated anger in Ku Klux:

     They took me out

     To some lonesome place.

     They said, “Do you believe

     In the great white race?”

Hughes was later accused of being a Communist.  His support for the socialist cause in the Spanish Civil War, his visit to Russia and his opposition to American involvement in World War II were enough to have him hauled before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.  He was interrogated and distanced himself from politics thereafter.

Hughes died in 1967 following complications after abdominal surgery.  His ashes are interred beneath a medallion in the floor of the Arthur Schomburg Centre for Black Culture in Harlem.

Some critics brand his poetry as “far too simple and unlearned”.  Others hail his work as lyrical, an authentic voice that reverberated from the 1920s to the 1960s.  As a biographer wrote, “Langston Hughes is among the most eloquent American poets to have sung about the wounds caused by injustice”.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has the last word: “Hughes’s poetry has a pulse, a beauty…Much of it delights, even dazzles.  His best work sticks with you — forever.”