Langston Hughes

I feel comfortable in stating that Langston Hughes was the narrator of black life in the early to mid nineteen hundreds. Not simply because he wrote about the lifestyle of the black Jazz movement, not only because he wrote about the oppression and struggles, but because he lived it, and brought it to a main stage for all to live the experiences through his writings. Langston Hughes' role as a writer is vital to the history of black and American culture and I think he understood this role and embraced it.

Langston Hughes was a well educated black man. Attending Columbia and leaving with a B average, and finally graduating from Lincoln University, not typical for black men, but this did not separate him from his people. It gave him the opportunity to have the voice of his people heard. His life came with the same problems many other blacks dealt with. Hughes' parents divorced when he was young. His father moved to Mexico and Langston was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen. At this young age he began his career as a writer. At the end of his grammar school days he was elected class poet. He was not elected because of a great ability to write, but because he was black, blacks have rhythm and poetry needs rhythm. [Meltzer] Nonetheless, this position would give way to a great career as a writer.

His first poems were attempts at the blues, stories of struggle. Hughes had been through the struggles himself. Many of his poems had a theme of poverty. Such as the stories of Po' Boy.

I fell in love with

A gal I thought was kind.

Fell in love with

A gal I thought was kind.

She made me lose ma money

An' almost lose ma mind.

[poemhunter]

Some might think that because Langston Hughes was such a successful writer he did not have issues with poverty, but he had them just the same as most other black people. As a student at Columbia, Langston dealt with money issues. His mother split from her husband and moved to New York so while Langston went to school he had to help his mother with finances as she looked for work. [Meltzer] After leaving Columbia Langston looked for a job, but soon found that no one was looking for a colored worker. There were no jobs for colored men in Harlem. There were high rents, scarce jobs, and low wages. Harlem was made into a slum for the black community. Langston struggled with this. He was supported for a time by Mrs. Rufus Osgood, and his friend Zora Neal Hurston sometimes sent him money. It is not easy for any man to struggle to support himself. Langston one wrote in a pocketbook, "I am just a bum on the road. You got to be hard inside. Maybe you might be soft outside, but you got to be hard inside." [Hughes journal] I think many black people felt this way, somewhat hopeless and barely hanging on. This is why Langston found it important to write about poverty in the black community. People outside of the community needed to hear about the struggles. It may not have been a happy story, but people sometimes need to hear what they do not want to.

Langston sometimes got into trouble, writing what people did not want to hear. Because of his writing about politics and other social issues Langston was banned from Cuba and the Soviet Russia. He was even brought