This is part one of a three-part series on Hughes.
Langston Hughes was the premier 20th-century poet for the U.S. working class, and particularly Black workers. He spoke to their dreams of a world without racism and the harsh realities of Jim Crow and pervasive segregation. Born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest, Hughes spent his early 20s attending colleges, working on ships, and traveling through West Africa and Europe. He became one of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920’s, when writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, actors, historians, sociologists, and activists made Harlem a dynamic center for culture and politics. Even the Depression of the 1930’s could not dampen this creative environment for Black artists, thinkers, and organizers.
The 1930’s was also the decade when many well-known artists embraced communist ideas in their quest to end the racist inequalities of capitalism. In 1932, Hughes went to the Soviet Union with a group of Black artists and filmmakers to create a film about Black life and racism in the U.S. South. (The project was canceled after Franklin Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union in the film footage) Later Hughes traveled to Spain for the Baltimore Afro-American, a weekly newspaper, to cover the anti-fascist struggle in the Spanish Civil War. This was the period of his most radical poetry, much of it submitted to New Masses, a weekly edited by members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). One of his most famous was “Good Morning Revolution,” which Hughes wrote in 1932. It openly calls for a society run by and for the working class. Here are some excerpts:
Good-morning, Revolution:
You’re the very best friend I ever had
We gonna pal around
together from now on.
…
Listen, Revolution,
We’re buddies, see –
Together,
We can take everything:
Factories, arsenals, houses, ships,
Railroads, forests, fields, orchards,
Bus lines, telegraphs, radios,
(Jesus! Raise hell with radios!)
Steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, gas,
All the tools of production,
(Great day in the morning!)
Everything –
And turn ‘em over
to the people who work.
Rule and run ‘em
for us people who work.
The political ground shifted in the 1940s, as the CPUSA focused less on communist revolution and more on building an anti-fascist united front to defeat Germany in World War II. Black workers and communists advanced the “Double V” goal—victory against the fascists in Europe and victory against segregation at home. In 1942, Hughes was hired by the Chicago Defender, another prominent Black newspaper. His columns attacked the racist abuse of Black soldiers stationed in the South, which Hughes compared to Nazi Germany. In a February 26, 1944 column, Hughes described a Black soldier just returned to the U.S. from fighting overseas. The soldier suffered from “Jim Crow shock, too much discrimination—segregation-fatigue which, to a sensitive Negro, can be just as damaging as days of heavy air bombardment.”
In August 1943, when a Black soldier was shot and wounded by a cop after a fracas at the Braddock Hotel at West 126 Street, the rumor spread that the soldier had been killed. In the ensuing rebellion, stores were looted and property damage was estimated at up to $5 million. Six thousand National Guardsmen were called in and over 600 people were arrested. (See Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., The Harlem Riot of 1943, Philadelphia: 1977.)
To Hughes, the politics of the incident were clear. In his August 14, 1943, Chicago Defender column addressed to “White Shopkeepers Who Own Stores in Negro Neighborhoods,” Hughes wrote:
The damage to your stores is primarily a protest against the whole rotten system of Jim Crow ghettos, Jim Crow cars, and Jim Crow treatment of Negro soldiers. But, you say, you are not responsible for those Jim Crow conditions. Why should your windows be broken? They shouldn’t. I am sorry they are. But I can tell you WHY they are broken.
Hughes goes on to cite Black workers’ grievances, from racist unemployment to price gouging and substandard housing.
He ends by observing:
I do not believe in mob violence as a solution for social problems. But I do understand what it is that makes many young people in Negro neighborhoods an easy prey to that desperate desire born of frustration—to which you contribute—to hurl a brick through a window.
In his book-length poem suite, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Hughes included the poem “Harlem,” which expresses visceral sensations of pent-up rage:
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?
In the late 1940s, as the U.S. capitalist rulers vied for world supremacy against the communist Soviet Union, the bosses’ federal government led the charge to investigate and harass members of the Communist Party USA. In January 1949, twelve CPUSA leaders, including Black New York City Councilman Benjamin Davis Jr., went on trial for violating the Smith Act by “advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.” Though Hughes never joined the CPUSA, his communist sympathies were clear. The FBI placed him under surveillance. Writing in the Chicago Defender, February 5, 1949, he declared that the trial was…
The most important thing happening in America today . . . because it is your trial—all who question the status quo—who question things as they are—all poor people, Negroes, Jews, un-white Americans, un-rich Americans are on trial. . . . They are being tried because they say it is wrong for anybody—Mexicans, Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Armenians—to be segregated in America; because they say it is wrong for anybody to make millions of dollars from any business while the workers in that business do not make enough to save a few hundred dollars to live on when they get old and broken down and unable to work anymore; they are being tried because they do not believe in wars that kill millions of young men and make millions of dollars for those who already have millions of dollars; they are being tried because they believe it is better in peace time to build schools, hospitals, and public power projects than to build warplanes and battleships.
By the 1950s, the bosses’ blacklisting and FBI harassment led many communists and leftists to retreat from open political organizing. But Hughes kept writing for the Chicago Defender until 1962. His bold and lyrical poetry, notably the two poems of One-Way Ticket (1951) that address lynchings in the South, live on as an inspiration to all who struggle against racism and for the international working class.