Simply Langston
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I was pleased to see that Google dedicated a "Google Doodle" kicking off Black History Month to Langston Hughes, born on Feb. 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, by animating his poem "I Dream a World."
I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom's way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind-
Of such I dream, my world!
My introduction to Langston Hughes wasn't his poetry, at first. My mom would read his "Jesse B. Semple" stories to me, and as soon as I could read, I read them over and over, because to me, they were "real" black people. When I got older, old enough to be hanging out in Harlem bars, I read them again. They still rang true.
From the Poetry Foundation biography:
Hughes reached many people through his popular fictional character, Jesse B. Semple (shortened to Simple). Simple is a poor man who lives in Harlem, a kind of comic no-good, a stereotype Hughes turned to advantage. He tells his stories to Boyd, the foil in the stories who is a writer much like Hughes, in return for a drink. His tales of his troubles with work, women, money, and life in general often reveal, through their very simplicity, the problems of being a poor black man in a racist society. "White folks," Simple once commented, "is the cause of a lot of inconvenience in my life." Simple's musings first appeared in 1942 in "From Here to Yonder," a column Hughes wrote for the Chicago Defender and later for the New York Post. According to a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews, their original intent was "to convince black Americans to support the U.S. war effort." They were later published in several volumes.
A more recent collection, 1994's The Return of Simple, contains previously unpublished material but remains current in its themes, according to a Publishers Weekly critic who noted Simple's addressing of such issues as political correctness, children's rights, and the racist undercurrent behind contraception and sterilization proposals. Donald C. Dickinson wrote in his Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes that the "charm of Simple lies in his uninhibited pursuit of those two universal goals, understanding and security. As with most other humans, he usually fails to achieve either of these goals and sometimes once achieved they disappoint him. . . . Simple has a tough resilience, however, that won't allow him to brood over a failure very long. . . . Simple is a well-developed character, both believable and lovable. The situations he meets and discusses are so true to life everyone may enter the fun. This does not mean that Simple is in any way dull. He injects the ordinary with his own special insights. . . . Simple is a natural, unsophisticated man who never abandons his hope in tomorrow."
A reviewer for Black World commented on the popularity of Simple: "The people responded. Simple lived in a world they knew, suffered their pangs, experienced their joys, reasoned in their way, talked their talk, dreamed their dreams, laughed their laughs, voiced their fears—and all the while underneath, he affirmed the wisdom which anchored at the base of their lives. It was not that ideas and events and places and people beyond the limits of Harlem—all of the Harlems—did not concern him; these things, indeed, were a part of his consciousness; but Simple's rock-solid commonsense enabled him to deal with them with balance and intelligence. . . . Simple knows who he is and what he is, and he knows that the status of expatriate offers no solution, no balm. The struggle is here, and it can only be won here, and no constructive end is served through fantasies and illusions and false efforts at disguising a basic sense of inadequacy. Simple also knows that the strength, the tenacity, the commitment which are necessary to win the struggle also exist within the Black community." Hoyt W. Fuller believed that, like Simple, "the key to Langston Hughes . . . was the poet's deceptive and profound simplicity. Profound because it was both willed and ineffable, because some intuitive sense even at the beginning of his adulthood taught him that humanity was of the essence and that it existed undiminished in all shapes, sizes, colors and conditions. Violations of that humanity offended his unshakable conviction that mankind is possessed of the divinity of God."
Hughes wrote a play based on a combination of Jess Simple stories:
Simply Heavenly, in 1957 starring
Claudia McNeil.
The writers, poets, playwrights, painters, actors, dancers, and philosophers of the Harlem Renaissance have been covered in numerous books and in documentary productions.
The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s. During this period Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars. Many had come from the South, fleeing its oppressive caste system in order to find a place where they could freely express their talents. Among those artists whose works achieved recognition were Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer, Walter White and James Weldon Johnson.
During this period Harlem was the Mecca to which black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars traveled.
W.E.B. Du Bois encouraged talented artists to leave the South. Du Bois, then the editor of THE CRISIS magazine, the journal of the NAACP, was at the height of his fame and influence in the black community. THE CRISIS published the poems, stories, and visual works of many artists of the period. The Renaissance was more than a literary movement: It involved racial pride, fueled in part by the militancy of the "New Negro" demanding civil and political rights. The Renaissance incorporated jazz and the blues, attracting whites to Harlem speakeasies, where interracial couples danced. But the Renaissance had little impact on breaking down the rigid barriers of Jim Crow that separated the races. While it may have contributed to a certain relaxation of racial attitudes among young whites, perhaps its greatest impact was to reinforce race pride among blacks.
For me, the heart and soul of that crew will always be Langston Hughes. My parents were two of those young black bohemians. Though they were immersed in the arts, they were also inextricably entwined with and engaged in radical politics. Communists, socialists, free-thinkers, anarchists, and those with burgeoning "race pride" fueled by Marcus Garvey—intermingled, argued and debated.
Most of what I have read on Langston focuses on his artistry and race. Not enough on his journeys through politics. In Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes, Jonathan Scott writes:
One of the first appreciations of Hughes's poetry was penned by a Cuban essayist and translator, José Antonio Fernández, and published in the Cuban press. And, as I learned from a Russian émigré, the saga of Jesse B. Semple was required reading in the old Soviet common school curriculum. In fact, a great diversity of Hughes's writing has been translated into Russian and Spanish. According to Hughes scholar Richard Jackson, when Hughes died in 1967 "his writings had been translated more than those of any other living American poet." That Hughes spent several years living and traveling in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in the Soviet Union, explains much of this. Indeed, his lifelong interest in the Bolshevik Revolution and in Latin American and Caribbean music and poetry, exemplified in the work he did as a professional translator and anthologist, has made Hughes a household name around the globe. To put it simply, in U.S. society, where the main cultural export to the rest of the world is anticommunist action movies, the dynamic and undeniable ties among Hughes, the Bolshevik Revolution, and Latin America and the Caribbean go a long way in explaining why so little has been written about these connections in the U.S. academy.
Other than his politics, in recent years there have been heated discussions
between his biographers, and
debateabout whether of not Hughes was gay. I don't know that anyone has proved it one way or the other, but the particular crowd of artistic folks who came together in those days wouldn't have given a damn. I grew up in a artistic/political household where it was never an issue, though granted, in parts of the more conservative church community it was hypocritically bad-mouthed.
Living in a world constrained by the racism of white society has given black writers a unique observation post, as outsiders who live also within that same world. Hughes was an acute and acerbic observer. "The Ways of White Folks," is a classic collection of his perspectives.
Here's a review from the blog Stuff White People Do:
In the stories collected in The Ways of White Folks, first published in 1934, Hughes deploys a variety of styles and moods to dramatize and analyze common white behaviors. In the opening story, "Cora Unashamed" (which was Masterpiece-ified by PBS in 2001), Hughes examines, from a black maid's perspective, a respectable white family's destructive allegiance to sexual propriety. "Slave on the Block," in which a couple of socialites adopt a handsome black man as their pet Negro, satirizes some of the more condescending tendencies of the wealthy white patrons of the black arts during the 1920s, when the Negro was in vogue.
In other stories, Hughes steadily unveils his characters' destructive tendencies, diagnosing specific symptoms of their pathological dedication to racial divisions. A white sailor visits one of his favorite black prostitutes but then leaves, unable to acknowledge what seems to him a horror, his own child. A small southern town refuses to acknowledge the genius of one of its own, a black musician returning from a journey to Europe who shouldn't be playing that music, and who shouldn't be dressing so well and then talking to white women, to our women.
In "Passing," a light-skinned man writes a subtly anguished, delirious letter to his black mother, who has agreed to silently pass him by on the street because he's passing for white. In "Father and Son," a proud, patrician Southerner with a kept black maid refuses to acknowledge the humanity of their "black" son, who in turn willfully refuses to suppress his own pride and promise. In all of the stories, tensions and conflicts rise to a boiling point as Hughes deconstructs the absurdities of the fiction that is "race."
There are of course other sides to Langston Hughes, and for those of you with children in your lives, you don't have do like my mom, and give them Jessie Semple.
Tony Medina, inspired by Hughes, has written a wonderful book for children.
Love to Langston is a book of poems for children written by the author in the voice of Langston Hughes (how he would imagine him). The poems were not written by Langston Hughes himself. The author, Tony Medina, explains why he created this collection in homage to the famous Harlem poet:
Langston Hughes’ Selected Poems was one of the first poetry books I ever read. The cover had a photo of Langston sitting in front of his typewriter, looking over his shoulder with a slight, hesitating grin. It was the first brown face I had ever seen looking out a me from the cover of a book – a face that reminded me of my face and the faces of my family.”
Fourteen original poems offer young readers an exciting glimpse into the life of Langston Hughes, one of America's most beloved poets. Each of Medina's engaging poems explores an important theme in Hughes' life — his lonely childhood, his love of language and travel, his dream of writing poetry. Extensive notes at the back of the book expand upon the poems, giving a broader picture of Hughes' life and the time in which he lived. With stunning illustrations by R. Gregory Christie, Love To Langston brings Langston Hughes to life for a new generation of readers.
There are too many
biographies of Hughes, and books on his work for me to list here. I hope you will visit, or re-visit his work.
For those of you who are in New York City, or planning to visit, take a trip uptown to the Schomburg Center.
On May 22, 1967, Hughes died from complications after abdominal surgery, related to prostate cancer, at the age of 65. His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. It is the entrance to an auditorium named for him. The design on the floor is an African cosmogram entitled Rivers. The title is taken from his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". Within the center of the cosmogram is the line: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers"
It is a fitting end to this piece, to hear Langston Hughes speak of the genesis of that poem.
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A New York police officer holds several black teens at gunpoint after he was called to the scene for a disturbance, which turned out to be a snowball fight. The Grio: NY cop holds black teens at gunpoint over snowball fight.
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A young women captured a New York police officer holding several black teens at gunpoint after he was called to the scene for a disturbance, which turned out to be a snowball fight.
The incident happened early last week and video was uploaded by LiveLeak and posted on New Rochelle’s Talk of the Sound on Saturday.
“Don’t f**king move, guys,” the officer can be heard saying on the cell phone video with his gun drawn. One of the teens is kneeling on the ground with his hands in the air. As the officer searched him, the woman filming the incident gave her account of what happened.
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A movement that heated up in Ferguson, Mo., is traveling around the world. Its latest stop: the United Kingdom. ColorLines: ‘Black Lives Matter’ Goes International.
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Patrisse Cullors, a Los Angeles-based organizer and co-founder of Black Lives Matter, is in the U.K. this week sharing the movement’s message in what’s been dubbed the Ferguson Solidarity Tour. Her visit comes on the heels of a 10-day trip to Palestine that activists from Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, BYP 100 and the Dream Defenders took in early January.
“It’s really important to build international solidarity, specifically around the global consequences of anti-black racism,” Cullors told Colorlines over the phone from Manchester. “Being inside the U.K. has been very revealing about the role law enforcement plays in terrorizing black communities in particular.”
The U.K. has been a hotbed of protest against racially charged police violence. In 2011, the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man, set off days of demonstrations, looting and arson across the country.
Cullors met with London families who’ve lost loved ones to police violence earlier this week, including the mother and brother of Julian Cole, a 21-year-old British black man whose neck was broken while police attempted to detain him in May 2013. He was left in a vegetative state.
Cullors also spent time with the sisters of Sean Rigg, a 40-year-old black man who had schizophrenia and died in police custody in 2008, and Christopher Alder, another black man who died while being detained by police, in 1998. “It was devastating,” Cullors said. “It reminded me a lot of the stories here in the U.S.”
Dream Defenders delegates pose with Palestinian kids in Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem in January 2015. Photo: Christopher Hazou/IMEU
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An African Union summit Friday endorsed the creation of a 7,500-member African force to fight the Nigerian extremist group Boko Haram, which has threatened to spread its deadly insurgency. LA Times: African Union backs regional force to confront Boko Haram.
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Nigeria insists that it doesn’t need an outside force to combat the group, which wants to set up an Islamic caliphate. However, Nigeria's often-outgunned military has lost control of a vast swath of the country’s northeast to Boko Haram over the last year.
Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma of South Africa, chairwoman of the African Union’s executive commission, told African leaders at the opening of their summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that a robust approach was crucial after recent attacks on Nigeria's neighbor, Cameroon, by Boko Haram fighters.
“Terrorism, in particular the brutality of Boko Haram against our people, [is] a threat to our collective safety, security and development,” Dlamini-Zuma said. “This has now spread to the region beyond Nigeria and requires a collective, effective and decisive response.”
Boko Haram has killed thousands of civilians in Nigeria and raised its black flag over dozens of villages, in effect surrounding Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state and a major regional trade center.
Abubakar Shekau, leader of Boko Haram tells the childrens mothers that he is selling them into slavery.
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What Happens When Transnational Adoptees Learn About Race? TalkingPointMemo: Instant Americans.
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She was the first person I spotted when I walked into the room. She sat behind a school desk, two thick black braids, denim overalls resting over a Gap T-shirt. Her skin, not entirely like mine, had a reddish undertone. She wasn't half-black like me, I was sure of that. But since we were at Shul, I determined she was Jewish like me. And I'd never met another Jewish person who wasn't white.
I walked over to her. I wasn't cool. I was overeager. I wanted to be her best friend.
"Hi, I'm Collier!"
"Sadye," she answered cautiously.
We graduated to phone calls, play dates and sleepovers. She introduced me to her friends. Even at 10 years old, she was self-possessed, and she seemed to have inherited an incredible sense of humor from her mom, Pam, who never made me feel like I was a little kid, and told me jokes I knew she was also telling her girlfriends.
I was younger than Sadye, only by a year, but when you’re nine, that’s a big deal. I took cues from her: Jellies and corduroys were cool, curly hair was not. And when she told me I was only one of two friends who knew she was adopted and that it was a secret I should never, ever tell anyone, I complied. Maybe she told me because that first time Sadye and I met in Shul, she saw a little of herself in me. I’m also brown and I’m also adopted.
But there was a giant difference between us: Unlike me, who was born in the United States, she was born on a farm in the middle of a civil war in El Salvador.
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He raises a very good and readily apparent point. Color Lines: David Oyelowo Says Academy Favors ‘Subservient’ Black Roles.
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“Selma” star David Oyelowo didn’t hold back during a recent ceremony at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival where he was honored as one of the year’s best actors. When asked about his Oscar snub and this year’s overwhelmingly white list of nominees, Oyelowo responded, in part, by saying, “This is truly my feeling; I felt this before the situation we’re talking about and I feel it now — generally speaking, we, as black people, have been celebrated more for when we are subservient, when we are not being leaders or kings or being at the center of our own narrative.”
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Being the son of a professional Historian, having a degree in History myself; I am both, amazed and appalled, by the blatant historical revisions and ignorance that is on display by the TeaBirchers© and their fellow travelers. From outright editing and distribution of Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists as a whole document, so as to support their dubious claims of the Founders being against the existence of a Wall between Church and State; to Fox News editing Obama's public exchanges so his presidency is diminished and marginalized.
Surely, if one has to lie to support an argument, the argument must not be very sound. What if we "edit" the lie out these discourses? What do we get? How about an honest assessment of where we came from:
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts.
-- James Baldwin
"A Talk to Teachers," Oct. 16, 1963
It is true that a Dream arose out of the disaffection experienced by those hungry, and poor, and convicted. It is true that tragedies and dangerous compromises occurred to make that Dream of America a possibility. Just let us not lie about where it was we came from and how it is we came to be who we are; let us look honestly to where our present is and where our future could be; let us not lie to make the Dream true. It is said, Knowledge is Power; and that is a sad truism when taking account of the axiom's terrible permutations. Ignorance though, masking itself as Knowledge, is not real Power, but real Ruination.
The only real course to stem this ruination then, is to embrace Knowledge and not Ignorance; to arm our minds and soul and activism against those corporate armies of propaganda, against those mobs of malice and hate; who in either, ignorance or guile, or both, would go to any means necessary than...
Let America Be America Again
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!
-- Langston Hughes
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