Langston Hughes - Biography, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Filmography (Read)

Langston Hughes - biography, date of birth, place of birth, filmography, clips, Writer, Actor.

February 1, 1902, Joplin, Missouri, USA - May 22, 1967, New York, USA - American poet, novelist, playwright and columnist.

The boy was the second child in a poor family of school teacher Kerry (Carolina) Mercer Langston and her husband James Nathaniel Hughes (1871-1934). From his parents Langston Hughes inherited Negro, European and even Native American roots. Both of his paternal grandmothers were black, and his paternal grandfathers were white: one was of Scottish descent and the other was Jewish. Langston grew up in the ghetto.

Hughes was named after his father and great-uncle, John Mercer Langston, who in 1888 became the first black American to be elected to the US Congress from Virginia. His maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson, was of Negro, French, English and Indian blood. She was one of the first women to attend Oberlin College. Mary Patterson married Lewis Sheridan Leary, who was also of mixed blood. Leary joined John Brown's men in the raid on Harpers Ferry, in which he was badly wounded and killed in 1859.

Mary Patterson remarried in 1869; her husband was Charles Henry Langston, whose ancestors were Africans, Indians and Europeans. He and his younger brother John Mercer Langston were abolitionists and led the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1958.

Subsequently, Charles Langston moved to Kansas, where he worked as a teacher and actively participated in the struggle for the rights of black people in the United States. Charles and Mary had a daughter, Caroline Murcer Langston, the mother of Langston Hughes.

The Hughes' marriage fell apart and his father left the family. He traveled to Cuba and then to Mexico in search of peace from the intolerable racism that reigned in the United States. After his parents divorced, the boy lived in Kansas, where he was raised by his grandmother Mary Patterson Langston. Through her generation's experiences of abolitionist struggles, Mary Langston instilled in young Hughes a strong sense of racial dignity. Hughes spent his childhood years in the town of Lawrence, Kansas. After the death of his grandmother, he was forced to live for two years with friends of the Hughes family, James and Mary Reed. Because of the instability in those years, his childhood was not happy, but even then Langston began to form as a poet. Later, Hughes lived in Lincoln, Illinois with his mother, Kerry, who remarried when Lagston was still in her teens. The family soon moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and Hughes went to high school.

At Lincoln High School, Langston was elected poet in his class. Years later, Hughes recalled that at first he believed that it was due to the stereotype that supposedly blacks have a sense of rhythm. Hughes said: “I was a victim of stereotypes. There were only two black children in the class, and our English teacher constantly emphasized the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everyone knows this, except for us, that all blacks have a sense of rhythm, and that's why I was elected a poet of the class. " During his studies in Cleveland, Langston worked for the school newspaper and was the editor of the yearbook, and already then began writing his first poems, stories and plays. His first poem in the direction of jazz poetry, When Sue Wears Red, was written when he was still in school. It was at the time when Langston became interested in reading books. It was during this period of his life that Hughes began to say that the American poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandberg had the greatest influence on his works.

Hughes had a strained relationship with his father. For a time in 1919 he lived with him in Mexico. The relationship was so tense and unhappy, more than once it pushed the young man to thoughts of suicide. After graduating from high school in June 1920, Hughes lived with his father again, trying to convince him to give him money to study at Columbia University.

At first, his father hoped that his son would go to some foreign university and choose an engineering profession. Under such conditions, he was ready to provide his son with financial support and pay for education. James Hughes did not share his son's desire to become a writer. In the end, they were able to come to a compromise - Langston must study engineering while attending Columbia University. After the tuition fees were paid, he left his father, with whom he lived for over a year. At the University, Langston received fairly good grades, but was forced to leave the institution in 1922 due to the constant racist attacks in his direction. In addition, in those years he was more interested in what was happening around Harlem than learning, and later Hughes returned to writing poetry.

For a long time, Hughes did not have a permanent job. In 1923 he joined the crew aboard the SS Malone, where he spent 6 months traveling from West Africa to Europe. Langston decided to stay in Europe when SS Malone made a temporary stop in Paris.

In the early 1920s, he joined the rest of the black immigrants living in Paris. In November 1924, Hughes returned to his homeland and settled with his mother in Washington. Since then, he changed many jobs, until he got a job as a personal assistant to historian Carter Woodson, who worked for the Association for the Study of the Life and History of African Americans. Dissatisfied with the working conditions that prevented him from engaging in literary activities, Hughes resigned and got a job as an assistant waiter at a hotel where he had to clean up dirty dishes. At that time, he met the poet Vachel Lindsay, whom he impressed with his poems. Even then, Hughes' early poems were published in various magazines and soon entered his first collection of poetry.

That same year, Hughes was admitted to the University of Lincoln, a renowned institution of higher education for blacks in Chester County, Pennsylvania. There he became a member of the African American Omega Psi Phi Brotherhood, based at Howard University in Washington DC. Thurgood Marshall, a graduate and fellow student of Langston Hughes, later became an Assistant Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

In the 1930s, he became close to the communist movement, like many other African American artists of that era, seeing socialism as an alternative to segregated America (in particular, he appreciated the participation of the US Communist Party in protecting the "boys from Scottsboro"). He participated in many pro-communist organizations like the John Reed Clubs, but never joined the Communist Party. Hughes's views were reflected in his poems of that time, and poetry was published in the publications of the Communist Party.

In January 1932, employees of the Soviet foreign trade department "Amtorg" invited Hughes to the USSR as the screenwriter for the film "Black and White" about racism in the United States. He assembled a delegation to the USSR, selecting 22 black Americans, mostly artists from among the natives of Harlem. After the start of filming in Crimea, the project was closed for a number of reasons, but in 1932-1933, part of Hughes' delegation went to Turkestan to assess what the Soviet government was doing for the indigenous peoples. In the Soviet Union, he was able to freely travel across the country, including places closed to Western eyes, becoming the first American with a camera in the Central Asian republics. In Turkmenistan, he became friends with the "wild Hungarian" Arthur Koestler, who became his translator, while in Uzbekistan, he stumbled upon Oliver Golden, an African-American communist, who was engaged in the development of new varieties of cotton on a local collective farm. Returning to the United States through China and Japan, Hughes in 1934 published the book "A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia."

Supporting the Republican struggles in the Spanish Civil War, went there in 1937 as a correspondent for a number of African American newspapers, including the Baltimore Afro-American; also his reports were published in the newspaper of the international brigades "Freedom Volunteer". On the other hand, he initially did not support the idea of ??the United States entering World War II until he came to the conclusion that the participation of black Americans in the war would help in the fight against racial segregation and the laws of Jim Crow. All this, as well as the fact that he advocated the decolonization of Africa, against discrimination against the black population of America, and even proposed the creation of autonomy for him in the southern United States, not only caused persecution as "red" from the right and racist circles, but attracted the attention of McCarthyists. In 1953, when Hughes testified to the McCarthy Commission, he distanced himself from the communists, as well as from political life in general.

Hughes left an extremely rich legacy in a wide variety of genres: poetry, novel, autobiographical prose, short stories, plays. He collaborated with newspapers, often publishing a series of satirical essays there, in which the protagonist is the black city dweller Simple.

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Author: Jane Watson