(This is the final part of our three-part series. For the previous parts, see www.plp.org)
Langston Hughes, a major 20th-century literary figure, moved significantly to the left in the mid-1930s—as a poet, playwright, and journalist. At a time when imperialist fascism in Italy and Germany brought on the invasion of Ethiopia (1935-37) the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), and eventually World War II (1939-1945), Hughes became one of the world’s leading communist and antiracist voices.
In 1933, after more than a year in the Soviet Union, Hughes returned to California and probably his favorite subject: the U.S. working class. He joined a group of writers and artists active in the local CPUSA-affiliated John Reed Club, named after the communist journalist and activist who covered the Bolsheviks’ October Revolution in 1917. Still involved in protests to free the Scottsboro Eight (see CHALLENGE, 3/17), he composed “One More ‘S’ in the USA,” a song for a CP fund-raiser for the Scottsboro victims of the capitalists’ criminal injustice system. He also co-wrote a play, never produced, called “Blood on the Fields,” about a strike by agricultural workers in the San Joaquin Valley.
Beyond his local activities, Hughes joined national organizations to foster multiracial unity by bringing leading Black writers and intellectuals into dialogue and actions with communists. He became president of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, which evolved into the National Negro Congress and involved such famous cultural figures as Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Catlett. Though Hughes always worked collectively, he was singled out for racist criticism and red-baiting, not to mention surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
In the mid-1930s, Hughes wrote and produced plays about Black working-class life and the importance of multiracial unity, such as When the Jack Hollers. But the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini in 1935—a pure act of racist aggression—turned the attention of Black workers to worldwide racism and fascism, the phase of capitalism when the bosses discard their charade of liberal democracy (see Glossary, p. 6). Black newspapers like the Amsterdam News reported weekly on Ethiopia.
Then, in 1936, came the Spanish Civil War, when General Francisco Franco and his armies rebelled against the leftist Popular Front government, supported by communists, socialists, and anarchists. Nazi Germany and fascist Italy sent arms and planes to help Franco. The Spanish “Republican” government appealed to the U.S., France, and Great Britain for aid. But not surprisingly, the capitalist bosses wanted nothing to do with it. By contrast, the Soviet Union sent aid and established International Brigades for workers of all nations to join. Thousands of workers from the U.S., Black and white, many of them communists, enlisted in the famous Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Within the U.S., communists raised funds for the war effort. Hughes helped organize the American Writers and Artists Ambulance Corps, which bought an ambulance for the bloody campaign.
The International Workers Order, another communist-organized organization, sent Hughes on a 12-city tour to raise more aid for the anti-fascists in Spain. The IWO published a A New Song, a booklet of 17 political poems by Hughes, including “Let America Be America Again,” “Justice,” “Chant for Tom Mooney,” “Chant for May Day,” “Ballads of Lenin,” and “Open Letter to the South” [see CHALLENGE, 3/17). In “Song of Spain,” Hughes moves from images of bullfights and flamenco guitarists to the grim realities of war:
A bombing plane
The song of Spain.
Bullets like rain’s
The song of Spain.
Poison gas is Spain.
A knife in the back
And its terror and pain is Spain.
…
The people are Spain
The people beneath that bombing plane….
…
Workers, make no bombs again!
Workers, mine no gold again!
Workers, lift no hand again
To build up profits for the rape of Spain!
Workers, see yourselves as Spain!
…
I must drive the bombers out of Spain!
I must drive the bombers out of the world!
I must take the world for my own again—
A workers’ world
Is the song of Spain.
Hughes subsequently went to Spain himself to send back wartime dispatches to the Baltimore Afro-American and other Black news agencies. En route he stopped in Paris to deliver a rousing speech, “Too Much of Race,” to the International Writers Congress. It included these communist ideas: “We represent the end of race. And the Fascists know that when there is no more race, there will be no more capitalism, and no more war, and no more money for the munition makers, because the workers of the world will have triumphed” (Brian Dolinar, The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation, p. 90). Hughes understood that capitalism absolutely requires racism to exploit and divide the working class.
In July 1937, Hughes crossed over the French Pryenees into northern Spain and then to Barcelona and Valencia. By August he was in Madrid, where he joined CPUSA members in the Lincoln Brigade and interviewed Black volunteers for his dispatches. When he traveled outside the city, communists helped arrange his tours. During his four months in Madrid, Hughes circulated among other writers hunkered down in the besieged city, including Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, and Lillian Hellman. The great singer and communist Paul Robeson also came to give concerts for the anti-fascist cause.
As historian Brian Dolinar has observed, “Hughes explained to black readers how the fight against fascism was connected to the fight against racism at home” (Dolinar, p. 87). His essays “Laughter in Madrid,” (published in The Nation, January 29, 1938), voiced admiration for workers’ courage and their resistance to fascist rule: “Yes, people still laugh in Madrid. In this astonishing city of bravery and death, where the houses run right up to the trenches and some of the street-car lines stop only at the barricades, people still laugh, children play in the streets. . . . Madrid, dressed in bravery and laughter; knowing death and the sound of guns by day and night, but resolved to live, not die!”
Back in the U.S., Hughes advocated for the Double V campaign, the connected struggles against racism in the U.S. and fascism in Europe.
In his journalism, poetry, plays, and essays, Hughes brilliantly conveyed the experiences of ordinary workers who strived to unite as a force for history. Progressive Labor Party can carry on Hughes’ legacy when we lead the way toward multiracial unity and communist revolution.
(Biographical information is drawn from Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. 2nd edition, New York: Oxford, 2002; and Brian Dolinar, The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.)