Langston Hughes and The Harlem Renaissance Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

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Langston Hughes and The Harlem RenaissanceImage
courtesy of the Library of Congress
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• The 1920s were the years of Manhattans black
  Renaissance. It began with Shuffle Along,
  Running Wild, and the Charleston. Shuffle Along
  was a honey of a show. Swift, bright, funny,
  rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable,
  singable tunes. Everybody was in the audience
  including me. Shuffle Along was the main reason
  I wanted to go to Columbia. When I saw it, I was
  thrilled and delighted. From then on I was in
  the gallery of the Cort Theatre every time I got
  a chance.
• Langston Hughes When the Negro Was in Vogue

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Key Facts The Harlem Renaissance

• The Harlem Renaissance refers to the flourishing
  of African-American culture between the two world
  wars.
• In this period of cultural awakening,
  African-American literature, music, art, theatre,
  and political thinking were all energized.
• The movement developed from a new pride in
  blackness, an interest in African cultural
  heritage, and an appreciation of the folkways and
  creativity of rural and urban blacks.
• The movement has its roots in W.E.B. Du Boiss
  The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and his founding
  of the magazine The Crisis (1910) it developed
  with Opportunity A Journal of Negro Life,
  founded by the National Urban League (1922) and
  edited by Charles S. Johnson.

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Key Facts The Harlem Renaissance

• James Weldon Johnson called Harlem the Negro
  capital of the world.
• However, the movement is sometimes called the
  Negro Renaissance as Harlem was just one center
  of the movement.
• In 1926, Hughes published The Negro Artist and
  the Racial Mountain, an essay which provided the
  Harlem Renaissance with its manifesto as Hughes
  called boldly for both racial pride and artistic
  independence. We younger Negro artists who
  create now intend to express our individual
  dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.

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African-American Self-Pride

• ? Langston Hughes criticized the black
  middle-class for ignoring their own culture in an
  attempt to appear elite
• Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the
  bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues
  penetrate the closed ears of the colored near
  intellectuals until they listen and perhaps
  understand. Let Paul Robeson singing Water
  Boy, and Rudolph Fisher writing about the
  streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the
  heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron
  Douglass drawing strange black fantasies cause
  the smug Negro middle class to turn from their
  white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to
  catch a glimmer of their own beauty.

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Key Facts The Harlem Renaissance

• Poets like Claude MacKay, Countee Cullen, and
  Hughes reacted against the erudite, inaccessible
  poetry of Modernists and wrote more accessible
  poems. Hughes said that a poem should be
  direct, comprehensible, and the epitome of
  simplicity.
• The poetry of the Harlem Renaissance shuns
  sentimentality, didacticism, stilted diction, and
  romantic escape. The poets experiment with black
  speech patterns, verse forms, and rhythms, often
  inspired by jazz and the blues.

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Key Facts The Harlem Renaissance

• Music was central to the flowering of the Harlem
  Renaissance. Jazz clubs such as the Harlem
  Casino, the Sugar Cane Club, and the Cotton Club
  entertained both black and white patrons. Harlem
  was home to Duke Ellington and Fats Waller.
• Whites comprised a substantial part of the
  audience. Whites were attracted to what they saw
  as the exotic in black life and black arts.

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• White people began to come to Harlem in droves.
  For several years they packed the expensive
  Cotton Club on Lenox Avenue. The Club was
  not cordial to Negro patronage, unless you were a
  celebrity like Bojangles. So Harlem Negroes did
  not like the Cotton Club and never appreciated
  its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of their
  dark community. Nor did ordinary Negroes like
  the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after
  sundown, flooding the little cabarets and bars
  where formerly only colored people laughed and
  sang, and where now the strangers were given the
  best ringside tables to sit and stare at the
  Negro customers like amusing animals in a zoo.
  
• Langston Hughes When the Negro Was in Vogue

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Blues and Jazz duringthe Harlem Renaissance

• During the Harlem Renaissance, blues and jazz
  gained in popularity with African-American and
  white audiences.
• The blues is a music that originated in the Deep
  South. Descended from African- American
  spirituals and work songs, the blues reflects the
  hardships of life and love in its lyrics.
  However, the blues can be humorous as well.

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Blues and Jazz duringthe Harlem Renaissance

• Most blues songs follow a form made of three
  phrases equal in length a first phrase, a second
  that repeats the first phrase, and a third phrase
  different from the first two concludes the verse.
  Here is the first verse of St. Louis Blues
• I hate to see dat evnin sun go down
• Hates to see dat evnin sun go down
• Cause ma baby, she done lef dis town.
• Langston Hughes draw on the blues form for
  Morning After
• I said, Baby! Baby!
• Please dont snore so loud.
• Baby! Please!
• Please dont snore so loud.
• You jest a little bit o woman but you
• Sound like a great big crowd.

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Blues and Jazz

• Jazz originated in the United States, primarily
  in New Orleans, developing from the blues and
  ragtime.
• Most jazz tunes follow a basic pattern. First
  the band plays the melody of the song. Next,
  soloists take turns improvising while the chord
  structure of the melody continues to play beneath
  them. Then, the band plays the melody one more
  time to conclude the song.
• Great blues and jazz artists to emerge during the
  Harlem Renaissance include Louis Armstrong,
  Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Count Basie,
  Josephine Baker, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday,
  Ella Fitzgerald, and Robert Johnson.

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Blues and Jazz

• Onwuchekwa Jemie, a Langston Hughes scholar,
  explains the difference between jazz and blues
• Unlike classic blues, the jazz poem has no
  fixed form it is a species of free verse which
  attempts to approximate some of the qualities of
  jazz. The dynamic energy of jazz is to be
  contrasted with the relatively low-keyed and
  generally elegiac tone of the blues. Blues is
  for the most part vocal and mellow, jazz for the
  most part instrumental and aggressive. The jazz
  poem attempts to capture that instrumental
  vigor.
• Dream Boogie by Langston Hughes is heavily
  influenced by jazz movements and rhythms. Note
  its opening lines
• Good morning, daddy!
• Aint you heard
• The boogie-woogie rumble
• Of a dream deferred?
• Listen closely
• Youll hear their feet
• Beating out and beating out a
• You think
• Its a happy beat?

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Key Facts The Harlem Renaissance

• Writers central to the Harlem Renaissance
  include Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Countee
  Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Weldon
  Johnson.
• Toomers master work is Cane, which combined
  poetry and fiction in its depiction of
  African-American life.
• In their poems, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen
  condemned bigotry and racial injustice in often
  explosive language.
• Zora Neale Hurston developed fiction and theater
  based on her personal experience, her
  anthropological fieldwork, African-American
  folklore, and Western mythology.
• However, at the center of the movement was
  Langston Hughes.

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Key Facts about Langston Hughes

• Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in
  1902. Both parents were mixed-race, and Langston
  Hughes was of African American, European
  American, and Native American descent.
• He was raised by his grandmother in Kansas, and
  at age 13, after the death of his grandmother,
  lived first with family friends for two years,
  and then with his mother in Illinois and then
  Cleveland, where he went to high school.
• In high school, Hughes wrote for the school
  newspaper, edited the yearbook, and wrote his
  first short stories, poems, and plays. Hughes
  relationship with his parents was never
  fulfilling. His mother never provided the
  maternal love that he sought and his relationship
  with his father was always strained. His father
  had left his family and moved to first Cuba and
  then Mexico, where Langston lived with his father
  for a year in 1919.
• His father wanted Langston to be an engineer, not
  a writer, and agreed to pay his college tuition
  at Columbia as long as he studied engineering.

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Key Facts about Hughes

• Hughes dropped out of Columbia in 1922 and
  worked various jobs before working as a seaman
  and as a newspaper correspondent and columnist
  for the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore
  Afro-American, and the New York Post.
• In late 1924, he returned to live with his mother
  in Washington, D.C., where he worked first as an
  assistant to Carter G. Woodson at the Association
  for the Study of African American Life and
  History. Dissatisfied with the work and lack of
  time to write, he quit.
• He then worked briefly as a cook at a fashionable
  restaurant in France and as a busboy in a
  Washington, D.C., hotel. It was there that
  Hughes left three of his poems beside the plate
  of a hotel dinner guest, the poet Vachel Lindsay,
  who recognized their merit and helped Hughes
  secure their publication.
• Hughes resumed his college studies at Lincoln
  University in Pennsylvania and earned his B. A.
  in 1929.
• After graduation, he settled in Harlem, which he
  became his primary home for the rest of his life.
• On May 22, 1967, Langston Hughes died from
  complications after abdominal surgery. His ashes
  are interred in the Arthur Schomburg Center for
  Research in Black Culture in Harlem near the
  entrance to the auditorium named after him.

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• Here I aint scared to vote thats another
  thing I like about Harlem. I also like it
  because weve got subways and it does not take
  all day to get downtown, neither are you Crowed
  on the way. Why, Negroes is running some of
  these subway trains. This morning I rode the A
  Train down to 34th Street. There were a Negro
  driving it, making ninety miles a hour. That cat
  were really driving that train! Every time he
  flew by one of them local stations look like he
  was saying, Look at me! The train is mine!
  That cat were gone, ole man. Which is another
  reason why I like Harlem! Sometimes I run into
  Duke Ellington on 125th Street and I say, What
  you know there, Duke? Duke says, Solid, ole
  man. He does not know me from Adam, but he
  speaks. One day I saw Lena Horne coming out of
  the Hotel Theresa and I said, Huba! Huba! Lena
  smiled. Folks is friendly in Harlem. I feel
  like I got the world in a jug and the stopper in
  my hand! So drink a toast to Harlem!
• Simple in A Toast to Harlem by
  Langston Hughes

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Key Facts about Hughes

• Hughes was a prolific writer who worked in
  many genres poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama,
  musicals, and childrens books. As a popular
  newspaper columnist, Hughes created a fictitious
  Harlem narrator named Simple.
• His life and travels are richly chronicled in
  his two volumes of autobiography, The Big Sea
  (1940) and I Wonder As I Wonder (1956).
• His first poem was published at age 19, The
  Negro Speaks of Rivers in The Crisis, and his
  final book of poems, The Panther and the Lash
  Poems of Our Times, the year of his death in
  1967.
• Deeply interested in developing a black
  theater, Hughes founded the Harlem Suitcase
  Theatre in New York in 1938, the New Negro
  Theater in Los Angeles in 1939, and the Skyloft
  Players in Chicago in 1942.
• His life and work were enormously important in
  shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem
  Renaissance. He wanted to tell the stories of
  his people in ways that reflected their actual
  culture, including both their suffering and their
  love of music, laughter, and language itself.

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• I explain and illuminate the Negro condition in
  America. This applies to 90 percent of my work.
• 
  Langston Hughes

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Negro by Langston Hughes

• Negro is one of Hughess many poems of
  heritage and strength. Consider the stanza which
  opens and closes the poem
• I am a Negro
• Black as the night is black
• Black as the depths of my Africa.
• The key words in the poem (Negro, Black,
  Africa) are emphasized by their placement and
  capitalization.
• Negro, which can be read as a companion to
  The Negro Speaks of Rivers, makes several
  historical allusions, including references to
  enslavement in ancient Rome, America, and Egypt,
  the post-slavery lynchings in the United States,
  and the brutal treatment of Africans in what was
  known as the Belgian Congo. (Belgium ruled the
  nation, now called the Democratic Republic of the
  Congo, from 1908 until 1960.)
• Ive been a singer
• All the way from Africa to Georgia
• I carried my sorrow songs.
• I made ragtime.
• Ive been a victim
• The Belgians cut off my hands in the
  Congo.
• They lynch me still in Mississippi.
• While Hughes references the Negro as victim,
  the poem does not focus on the pain of
  victimization. Instead, Hughes emphasizes his
  peoples ability to endure, survive, and create.
  

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Ballad of the Landlord

• In the poem, Hughes presents a standoff between
  a landlord and tenant. The tenant, whose
  requests for repairs have been ignored, threatens
  to withhold his rent. The landlord demands the
  rent or the tenants furniture will be thrown
  into the street. The exacerbated tenant returns
  the threat You aint gonna be able to say a
  word / If I land my fist on you. The landlord
  calls the police the tenant is placed under
  arrest and sentenced to ninety days.
• Hughes draws from two social archetypes to
  reveal inner-city living conditions. The
  archetypes are defined by Richard Barksdale as a
  disgruntled tenant and a tightfisted landlord.
• Barksdale continues, The literature of most
  capitalist and noncapitalist societies often pits
  the haves against the have-nots, and not
  infrequently the haves are wealthy men of
  property who lord it over improvident men who
  own nothing. So the confrontation between tenant
  and landlord was in 1940 just another instance of
  the social malevolence of a system that punished
  the powerless and excused the powerful. In fact,
  Hughess tone of dry irony throughout the poem
  leads one to suspect that the poet deliberately
  overstated a situation and that some sardonic
  humor was supposed to be squeezed out of the
  incident.
• from Langston Hughes The Poet and His Critics

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Ballad of the Landlord continued

• Is Barksdales reading of the poem accurate?
  Does the power structure better protect one
  character than the other? How is this reflected
  in the whistle, bell, and arrest? Is the poem
  humorous in any way?
• Consider the newspaper headlines. Is the first
  one a distortion? Is the media depicted as a
  tool of those in power? Consider the references
  to the protagonist in the headline man,
  tenant, Negro. Does the very order of the
  words suggest increasing victimization and
  powerlessness while in the hands of the system?
• What is suggested by the shortness and harsh
  sounds of lines 28-30? Is Hughess suggesting
  that description and many words are not needed
  for what is a routine and commonplace incident?
  The reader, he suggests, will easily be able to
  fill in the other events.

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Let America Be America Again

• Let America Be America is a strong
  expression of Hughess ambivalence towards
  America.
• Hughes is grateful to the founding fathers for
  articulating their vision of a land free from
  tyrants and a nation of life, liberty, and the
  pursuit of happiness.
• Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed
  
• Let it be that great strong land of love
• Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
• That any man be crushed by one above.
• These lines echo I Dreamd in a Dream of Walt
  Whitman, who was an important influence on
  Hughes
• I dreamd in a dream I saw a city invincible to
  the attacks of the whole of the rest of the
  earth,
• I dreamd that was the new city of Friends,
• Nothing was greater than the quality of robust
  love

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Let America Be America Again continued

• However, Hughes is angry that the promise of
  America has never been available to him or to
  certain groups of people.
• I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
• I am the Negro bearing slaverys scars.
• I am the red man driven from the land
• America never was America to me,
• And yet I swear this oath
• America will be!

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Let America Be America Again continued

• He is hopeful that one day America will fulfill
  its promise, and he calls on exploited and
  marginalized peoples to rise up and see through
  the realization of the dream. Note how the poem
  in its urgency builds to its angry but hopeful
  conclusion.
• We the people, must redeem
• The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
• The mountains and the endless plain
• All, all the stretch of these great green
  states
• And make America again!
• The poem resonates in the songs of Woody
  Guthrie, including This Land is Your Land
  (first drafted in 1940), as it reads like a
  socialist or workers vision of America, while
  also resonating in Martin Luther Kings famous
  speech I Have a Dream (1963).

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White City Claude McKay

• In this poem McKay expresses his ambivalence
  toward New York City, identifiable in the trains,
  ports, and tall buildings. He resents the city
  as a main cultural center of Western civilization
  with its imperialistic and racial practices, and
  will remain defiant toward it. However, he finds
  energy and inspiration in its vital blood.
• The first quatrain emphasizes his disdain and
  defiance
• I will not toy with it nor bend an inch.
• Deep in the secret chambers of my heart
• I muse my life-long hate, and without flinch
• I bear it nobly as I live my part.
• In the second quatrain, the speaker introduces
  his ambivalence by acknowledging the city as his
  dark Passion, his inspiration, which might be
  both nurturing and debilitating
• My being would be a skeleton, a shell,
• If this dark Passion that fills my every mood,
• And makes my heaven in the white worlds hell,
• Did not forever feed me vital blood.

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White City continued

• In the third quatrain, we see the citys
  inspiration at work in the speakers energetic
  visual imagery
• I see the mighty city through a mist
• The strident trains that speed the goaded
  mass,
• The poles and spires and towers vapor-kissed,
• The fortressed port through which the great
  ships pass,
• The concluding couplet encapsulates the
  speakers ambivalence
• The tides, the wharfs, the dens I contemplate,
• Are sweet like wanton loves because I hate.
• Interestingly, McKay uses a sonnet, a complex
  Western literary form to express his ambivalence
  i.e., his attraction and rejection of Western
  culture and the city which symbolizes, for him,
  that culture.
• What specifically attracts the speaker to the
  culture? What does he reject? How does race
  inform the sonnet?

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Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem Helene Johnson

• In this sonnet, Johnson personifies Harlem as a
  proud, defiant, and swaggering young man who
  expresses himself in rich, barbaric song
• You are disdainful and magnificent
• Your perfect body and your pompous gait,
• Your dark eyes flashing solemnly with hate,
• Small wonder that you are incompetent
• To imitate those whom you so despise
• Your shoulders towering high above the throng,
  
• Your head thrown back in rich, barbaric song,
• Palm trees and mangoes stretched before your
  eyes.
• In these first two quatrains, Johnson extols
  Harlem for its bluster, independence, and
  strength, and its insistence on itself. Harlem
  is set apart from the rest of the city and does
  not try to assimilate. Steeped in a culture
  derived from its peoples roots, Harlem has a
  unique beauty.

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Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem continued

• In the concluding lines, Johnson praises
  Harlem as the outsider who refuses to participate
  in a culture that will only efface its
  contributions
• Let others toil and sweat for labors sake
• And wring from your grasping hands their meed
  of gold.
• Why urge ahead your supercilious feet?
• Scorn will efface each footprint that you make.
• I love your laughter arrogant and bold.
• You are too splendid for this city street.
• The speaker admires the pride and grandeur that
  Harlem demonstrates in its loud and gallant
  aloofness. In a sense, the speaker is inspired
  by Harlem and, in turn, tries to keep Harlem
  inspired.
• Has Johnson written a Shakespearean or
  Petrarchan sonnet? Has she combined the two
  forms? Is it fitting, ironic, or just unusual
  that Johnson has created this portrait in a
  sonnet?

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• Hughess art was firmly rooted in race pride
  and race feeling even as he cherished his freedom
  as an artist. He was both nationalist and
  cosmopolitan. As a radical democrat, he believed
  that art should be accessible to as many people
  as possible. He could sometimes be bitter, but
  his art is generally suffused by a keen sense of
  the ideal and by a profound love of humanity,
  especially black Americans. He was perhaps the
  most original of African American poets and, in
  the breadth and variety of his work, assuredly
  the most representative of African American
  writers.
• 
  - Arnold Rampersad,
  biographer

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For Further Consideration

• Hughes once wrote, Poetry should be direct,
  comprehensible, and the epitome of simplicity.
  After reading one of his poems, Ezra Pound wrote
  to Hughes Thank God at last I come across a
  poem I can understand. Arnold Rampersad writes
  that Hughes wished to write no verse that was
  beyond the ability of the masses of people to
  understand.
• How are these statements reflected in Hughess
  poems? Does his poetics limit him as a poet?
  Are his poems simplistic in style and theme as a
  result? Or are they in some way energized,
  specific, and very meaningful? In a sense, can
  they be simple but not simplistic? Refer to
  several poems in your response.
• 2. Consider the final line in several of
  Hughess poems. Do they seem especially
  climatic? Compare them to other last lines from
  poems in the text.
• 3. Based on the poems in the text, how would
  you define Hughess vision of America? How can
  it be said that Hughes is engaged in a continuous
  dialogue with the principles of the founding
  fathers?