1930s: Langston Hughes, poet of the communist movement

The last issue of CHALLENGE (3/1/23) remembered Langston Hughes as a writer sharply critical of Jim Crow segregation during World War II and as a poet for the working class of the U.S.—particularly Black workers.  Now we’ll flash back to the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Hughes became an advocate for multiracial, anti-capitalist revolution.  A tradition of anti-racist activism ran deep in Hughes’ family history. In 1858, his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, married Lewis Leary, an abolitionist who died in John Brown’s 1859 raid in Harper’s Ferry. Her second husband, Charles Howard Langston, was an educator and ardent abolitionist.  

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Art for antiracists: Langston Hughes and the Spanish Civil War

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.

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1930s: Langston Hughes, major poet of the communist movement

The previous issue of CHALLENGE (3/3) remembered Langston Hughes as a writer sharply critical of Jim Crow segregation during World War II and as a poet for the U.S. working class—particularly Black workers. Now we’ll flash back to the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Hughes became an advocate for multiracial, anti-capitalist revolution.  
A tradition of antiracist fightback ran deep in Hughes’s family history. In 1858, his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, married Lewis Leary, an abolitionist who died in John Brown’s 1859 raid in Harper’s Ferry. Her second husband, Charles Howard Langston, was an educator and ardent abolitionist.
Hughes’s influences
According to his biographer Arnold Rampersad, young Langston Hughes was influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Claude McKay, along with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the antiracist, pro-communist writer and historian. In June 1921, Hughes’ poetry was published for the first time in a professional journal. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” came out in The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP.

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1940s Langston Hughes: Antiracist writer & communist

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. 

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