May 22, 2017 will mark fifty years since the death of American writer Langston Hughes at age 65. No one could argue that the self-proclaimed “Poet Low-Rate of the Harlem Renaissance” has gone uncelebrated: he has had many schools and libraries named after him, his image has appeared on a US postage stamp and a New York subway mural, and his work has been cited as an influence by countless writers. By almost anyone’s measure his work is now included in the established canon of American literature.
But the legacy of Langston Hughes has been sanitized and (if you will pardon the expression) whitewashed, at least in the popular imagination. Hughes was a hugely prolific writer, and a complex figure. That complexity has been obscured by his enshrinement in anthologies, school curricula, and popular culture, which all tend to emphasize Hughes’ folksy blues poems and his less confrontational celebrations of blackness.
But Hughes was also an iconoclast and radical, one whose most unapologetically political work seems more vital now than ever. In the early 1930s, Hughes had traveled extensively in the Soviet Union, largely as a guest of the Soviet government. During this period he also published many works of furious left-wing agitprop: “Put one more S in the USA,” he wrote in one 1934 poem, “to make it Soviet.” He was repeatedly investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and was once subpoenaed by Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Sub-Committee.
Aesthetically, his radical work from the 1930s was the weakest, least subtle writing of Hughes’ oeuvre. To ignore it, though, is to diminish the scope of his life’s work, and to understate his courage. Hounded by right-wing protesters at his readings, called out in the magazine Life in 1949 as one of fifty purportedly Communist “dupes and fellow travelers,” and later pilloried on the national stage by senators and congressmen, Hughes had cause to regret his most openly radical writings. Yet he continued vocally to oppose fascism, racism, colonialism, and class oppression throughout his life.
Often his loyalties put Hughes on the side of Communist revolutions that ended in harsh authoritarian regimes, not least the Soviet Union. But for Hughes, Communism promised justice for two overlapping groups to whom he felt fierce loyalty: workers and people of color. Visiting what is now Uzbekistan in 1932, he was impressed with how Soviet rule had ended the racial segregation of public transportation: “In ten short years,” he later wrote, “Jim Crow was gone on trams, trains, or anywhere else in Central Asia.” Soviet policy on racial equality was so much preferable to him over American racism that he seemed willing to overlook the violent means that were employed to achieve its ends. And so he could write in 1932 of a vision in which the “Red Armies of the International Proletariat / Their faces, black, white, olive, yellow, brown, / Unite to raise the blood-red flag.”
Hughes’ racial consciousness was the filter through which he saw everything and through which he wrote about the world. And we don’t need to adopt his willful blindness toward authoritarian left-wing regimes in order to learn from Hughes’ critiques of American society. The imprisonment of nine black teenagers on false allegations of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931 particularly inflamed his sense of injustice, inspiring him to write many poems and essays as well as the agitprop play Scottsboro Limited. (Had Hughes lived to 1989, he would have felt unwelcome déjà vu when five black teenagers were wrongfully arrested for the rape and murder of a jogger in Central Park, and businessman Donald Trump took out an ad in the New York Daily News calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty to deal with “roving bands of wild criminals.”)
Scottsboro Limited ends with a call from actors planted in the audience to “Rise from the dead, workers, and fight! All together, black and white.” No message could be more threatening to the agenda of white nationalism that we see resurging today. And so it is vital, especially for those of us who teach the works of Langston Hughes, to recognize and remember the angry revolutionary Hughes.
If the radical Hughes could have read newspapers from the past few years, he would have been depressed but unsurprised by the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the deaths of so many black people at the hands of police. The radical Hughes would have shared the righteous outrage that motivates movements such as Black Lives Matter. The poet who wrote of black Americans being “sent to eat in the kitchen when company comes” would have been greatly surprised to see a biracial man elected president in 2008, but not at all surprised that a would-be authoritarian would follow him to power on a wave of white nationalist resentment. It was Hughes, after all, who wrote “The Backlash Blues” for his friend Nina Simone in 1967, weeks before his death, and described his political outlook bleakly in another, posthumously published poem:
Concocted by history
Brewed by fate—
A bitter concentrate
Of hate.
Though pessimistic, these late poems point out truths important to remember. They remind us that the forces of racial and religious antagonism, scapegoating, and white nationalism—all of which helped propel Donald Trump narrowly to an electoral college victory last November—are nothing new in America, even if they are newly emboldened.
Hughes’ work also helps us recall that the history of African Americans’ struggle for freedom has always been a story of progress alternating with backlash. The radical Hughes would be dismayed to see the cycle entering an ugly stage once again. Yet he would have continued to hope for people of all races to break the cycle and unite against oppression. His plea in “Open Letter to the South” (1932) to white southern workers to unite with black workers seems as urgent now as it ever did:
Let us become instead, you and I,
One single hand
That can united rise
To smash the old dead dogmas of the past. . . .
Shane Graham is associate professor of English at Utah State University, and the author of a book-in-progress on Langston Hughes and his connections to African and Caribbean writers.