Here to Yonder: The Chicago Defender columns of Langston Hughes
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Langston Hughes is, of course, best known for his lyrical poetry depicting a picturesque vision and version of Black life in the early 20th century during the Black literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.
What’s sometimes not as well known about Hughes is that he also wrote two autobiographies, The Big Sea (published in 1940 and Hughes’ on account of his life up to the age of 28), and I Wonder as I Wander, published in 1956 and detailing his travels around the world during the 1930’s.
What’s even lesser known about Hughes is that he also wrote a newspaper column, called “Here to Yonder” in what some considered to be the premier Black newspaper of its time, The Chicago Defender; Hughes wrote that column for 20 years.
To the extent that Hughes’s Chicago Defender column is acknowledged, it’s usually for his series featuring the Black “Everyman,” Jesse B. Semple (“Simple” or, as Hughes would sometimes refer to him, my “Simple Minded Friend”). Here’s a description of the content of the Jesse B. Semple stories by Minnesota blogger Bernard James.
The indomitable spirit of Jesse B. Semple (aka “Simple”) was first introduced by Langston Hughes in 1943, through a series of stories that appeared in a column he wrote for the Chicago Defender. Simple’s legacy as a literary fixture was later cemented following the release of three compilations that made Hughes’ original content available for wider public consumption. The first was Simple Speaks His Mind, published in 1950, followed by Simple Takes a Wife in 1953 and Simple Stakes a Claim, released in 1957. Subsequent anthologies (The Best of Simple, 1961, Simple’s Uncle Sam, 1965 and The Return of Simple, 1994) sample from the earlier pieces to form new collections, but the charisma that is Simple and the grace with which Hughes delivers him to the page are no less impactful when viewed through this updated, curatorial lens.
Each story is presented as a conversation that opens a window onto the beauty of pedestrian encounters. Indeed, part of what makes them so beautiful is the ongoing discovery that Simple’s life (our lives) are not pedestrian at all. “Simple on Indian Blood,” “Simple Prays a Prayer,” “Temptation,” “Vacation,” “Letting off Steam…” The titles are succinct, the prose direct and easy to understand. Through Simple, Hughes elevates the ordinary and shines a spotlight on what is otherwise common. Simple becomes a metaphor for profound statements exploding from unassuming packages. Hughes’ abbreviated prose cuts to the chase and by intensifying the mood, brings his subjects into better focus.
Hughes’s Simple stories were, by far, the most popular of his Chicago Defender columns, however, it is important to remember that the Simple stories were not featured on a weekly basis; Hughes also wrote far more conventional oped columns that covered a variety of subjects ranging from Jim Crow to even U.S. foreign policy.
An indispensable resource for many of Hughes’s “non-Simple” columns is Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62 , edited by Dr. Christopher DeSantis, published in 1995. While the volume is far from a complete collection of Hughes’s Chicago Defender columns, it does lay out some of the general themes that Hughes touched upon time and again in his column.
In his introduction to Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender, DeSantis notes the circumstances under which Hughes accepted the offer of Chicago Defender editor-in-chief Metz P.T. Lochard to write a weekly column
“Despite numerous publications and a Broadway play to his credit...Hughes was, at age forty, still battling chronic poverty. Radio and the movies, major sources of money for white writers, generally barred talented African American writers from enjoying similar financial success. Hughes’s eager acceptance of Lochard’s offer thus served a dual purpose: on one hand, it would reach a wider African American audience with his writings, and on the other hand he could look forward to a consistent paycheck.”
Hughes’s “Here to Yonder” column debuted in the November 21, 1942 issue of The Chicago Defender with these first words:
Things that happen away off yonder affect us here. The bombs that fall on some far-off Second Front in Asia rattle the dishes on your table in Chicago or New Orleans, cut down on your sugar, coffee, meat ration, and take the tires off of your car. Right now, Hitler is about to freeze your salary or your work, although his activities are centered around Stalingrad. But it is not so far from here to yonder.
For the last 20 years, half writer and half vagabond, I have traveled from here to yonder around the world and back again, up and down the African coast, through Russia, through Asia, back and forth across America and, in general, from pillar to post. One thing I’ve learned is that Alabama and Africa have the same problems. Stalingrad and Chicago fight the same gangsters. Two 14 year old boys are lynched at Shubuta Bridge and Harlem shudders—also Chungking.
What happens at the post affects the pillar and vice versa. Here is yonder, and yonder is here. When you do wrong, it affects me. If I don’t behave myself, it hurts you. When you do good, it helps me. When I do good, I hope it aids you. When white folks do wrong, in the long run it lays as heavy a burden on them as us. Witness India, witness Malaya, witness the poverty of the South and the sorry spectacle of Shubuta Bridge.
That’s Langston Hughes, sure enough: the lyricism, the Black idioms, the Whitmanesque themes and approach, an acknowledgement of the reality of the world that he saw, and the ideals of the world that he—and most Black people then and now— wished to be.
While this inaugural column was reprinted in the DeSantis-edited volume, the one true indispensable way of reading the “Here to Yonder” columns is in the context they were written in; the archived pages of the Chicago Defender. The placement of Hughes’s oped, which is to the very right on the Defender’s editorial page also includes editorials of the defeat of Nazi forces in North Africa, the importance for Black folks to practice “global thinking,” a letter to the editor suggesting that Negro leaders should be asking the Roosevelt Administration if Negroes can have a seat at whatever peace talks are to come in the future...and there’s the obligatory letter about the high price of goods at the neighborhood store…
In other words, Hughes’s essay and its references to his travels are not out of place. Many potential readers of Black newspaper archives of even the 1930’s might be surprised by the “cosmopolitan” nature of the Black newspaper even as it’s focused on Black concerns and a Black perspective.
Hughes’s speculations are not at all out of place.
If the column was written 10 years before, in November 1932, the somewhat “cosmopolitan” nature of Hughes’s oped would not have been out of place in the Chicago Defender.
The DeSantis volume has a couple of weaknesses: it arranges Hughes’s columns by topic as opposed to sequentially, so it is somewhat difficult to see and understand the range of Hughes’s thought and how those thoughts might be interrelated over a period of time and through a wide-ranging number of subjects. I also could have used a few of the Simple stories in a sequential arrangement. Granted, the Simple stories have been widely reprinted; the Simple stories are a part of the “Here to Yonder” series.
DeSantis does invite the reader to read the Chicago Defender archives and Hughes’s essays in context and two of my favorite essays in the series happen to be columns that were not reprinted in DeSantis’s book.
There’s his May 1, 1943 column about an attempted mugging:
However, the other night, I was going down a dim dark street alone, a guy suddenly stepped out from behind a fence in front of me and said STOP! At once, the whole subject of mugging became intensely personal.
I said, “Stop nothing!” And reversed in true trackman style (I used to run the 440 in high school), thus I kept my neck and purse intact, leaving the mugger standing by the fence. But my imagination furnished me a complete robbery. I felt myself stabbed, shot, choked, and fleeced. Now, when anyone tells me how they were waylaid last night and held up, I will not only listen with interest, I shall also understand.
Hughes was (checks Wikipedia) 42 years old at the time.
Some things never leave you, I guess.
Another of my favorite columns was his observations of a racially segregated audience attending a Marian Anderson concert in Atlanta; his observations were written for his “Here to Yonder” column of March 29, 1947.
I went to a Marian Anderson concert the other day, and they had the audience divided into white and colored, dead down the middle and nobody dared to cross that line. That did not look civilized to me, because the same music went in all ears. Marian Anderson had a white accompanist and she kept taking bows with him and holding him by the hand while they both took bows. But if a white person and a colored person in the audience had held hands across the dividing aisle, evidently it would have been against Georgia law, and they could be put in jail.
Some of the colored people on the colored side were so white that they looked just like white folks, and some of the white people on the white side were so colored that they looked just like colored folks. So somebody who wasn’t colored must have held hands with somebody who wasn’t white at some time in Georgia, else how could so many colored folks look so white and so many white folks look colored? I do not know. Anyhow, it is against the law for for even colored folks who look white to sit next to white folks who look colored in public. Which to me does not make much sense, and I think it makes Georgia a backward area.
That’s a pretty eloquent example of the obscenity and absurdity of Jim Crow and racial segregation...for some reason, I find this particular description both funny as hell and painful.
As of this moment, I am still reading through some of Hughes’ “Here To Yonder” columns.
I think that you owe it to yourself to find a Chicago Defender archive and enjoy reading one of the most prominent poets of all time; he was a damn good columnist too!
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent the chairwoman of the caucus, Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, to announce a key deal, understanding that the lawmaker held sway with balky progressives. New York Times: The Congressional Black Caucus Was Key to the Infrastructure Vote
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Another showdown day over President Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda dawned Friday full of optimism, even after the drubbing that Democrats took in the off-year elections on Tuesday. But by afternoon, lawmakers again seemed stuck when leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus entered Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.
Seeking to bridge the gap between a resolute clutch of balking Democratic moderates and a much larger group of liberals demanding that the president’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan only pass concurrently with his $1.85 trillion social welfare and climate change bill, the Black lawmakers proposed a plan that initially seemed far too timid and convoluted: pass the infrastructure bill immediately, then hold a good-faith procedural vote on the larger bill that would have to suffice before its final vote in mid-November.
Ms. Pelosi agreed to the deal and then, tellingly, sent the low-key chairwoman of the Black Caucus, Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, out to waiting reporters to tell the world. In effect, the speaker had harnessed one faction of her unruly Democrats to win over two others, and understood that the soft-spoken African American lawmaker might have had more influence at that point than she did.
Nine hours later, at 11:20 p.m., House Democrats, with help from a few Republicans, sent to Mr. Biden the largest public works bill since President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Interstate System. They also took a major step toward approving a stalled sweeping social safety net measure, producing the kind of legislative progress many in the party say was long overdue and necessary to avoid an electoral disaster for Democrats in next year’s midterms.
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As a general rule it’s not good to jump onto too much analysis of an election 24 hours after people have cast votes. There’s a tendency to hot take the results to death, to proclaim with loud click-baity certainty that what just happened will reverberate for years to come positively or negatively for some party.
This is especially important for Black voters who are so often erased from public discourse about campaigns until some Democrat loses, in which case someone inevitably blames us for our lack of fealty to a party that treats us like a side-piece on the holidays. There were good and bad results for Black voters on Tuesday and by extension some lessons to be learned that didn’t become clear until the dust settled.
With that being said, here is a short list of what we learned and what we didn’t learn from this past Tuesday’s elections.
In Hollywood, like it or not, reboots often work. We’re about to see the 6th white guy play Batman on screen next summer, The Equalizer has been a hit (both the Denzel Washington and Queen Latifah versions), and despite the show reeking of white respectability politics it looks like the Wonder Years — which is being rebooted with a Black family this time around — has captured an audience.
In politics, however, reboots often don’t work. That was one lesson from the Virginia elections where Terry McAuliffe, who squeaked by to win the governorship by 2% points in 2013, came back to run again in 2021 and was defeated by Republican Glenn Youngkin with just by 2% between them. McAuliffe didn’t run a terrible campaign, but he was never a candidate that was going to inspire Black voters, even though they turned out for him at high numbers.
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The director of the African American Male Initiative at North Carolina Central University's Men’s Achievement Center said that having a male educator is an important factor in the development process for students. The Grio: New program aims to increase the number of Black male teachers
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There are marginal numbers of Black male teachers in the United States and the North Carolina Central University School of Education (NCCU) announced a new program to tackle that issue.
The HBCU launched the Marathon Teaching Institute — an initiative started in August to increase the number of minority male school teachers and higher-level administrators, with a particular focus on African American men.
The program will target young men looking to get into education and will provide them with professional development, financial assistance, peer mentorship and social support.
Students will be given a $25,000 scholarship and a guaranteed job as a teacher once they complete schooling.
“We want to make sure that we have that same strength towards preparing our teachers for their futures right here on this campus,” said Quintin Murphy, the chief recruiting and retention officer for the NCCU School of Education.
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While researching the leadership journeys of Black women in academia, psychologist Kecia M. Thomas, now dean of the college of arts and sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, noticed an unsettling theme repeating itself in the interviews she conducted. At the beginning of their careers, the women she spoke to said they believed they were well liked, if tokenized or overprotected by colleagues. But as they began to push for opportunities to grow or expand their roles, the benevolent tolerance they had enjoyed transformed into pushback, if not outright hostility. Thomas dubbed that transformation the “pet to threat” phenomenon. In an interview with Zora magazine, she explained that the inflection point most often came just as the women she spoke to were in a position for promotion or leadership. “That’s when women are probably most vulnerable to getting recast as threatening, because their colleagues are pushing back on the person legitimately exerting their influence in the workplace,” she said.
While researching the leadership journeys of Black women in academia, psychologist Kecia M. Thomas, now dean of the college of arts and sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, noticed an unsettling theme repeating itself in the interviews she conducted. At the beginning of their careers, the women she spoke to said they believed they were well liked, if tokenized or overprotected by colleagues. But as they began to push for opportunities to grow or expand their roles, the benevolent tolerance they had enjoyed transformed into pushback, if not outright hostility. Thomas dubbed that transformation the “pet to threat” phenomenon. In an interview with Zora magazine, she explained that the inflection point most often came just as the women she spoke to were in a position for promotion or leadership. “That’s when women are probably most vulnerable to getting recast as threatening, because their colleagues are pushing back on the person legitimately exerting their influence in the workplace,” she said.
This kind of experience—which results in justified paranoia and hypervigilance being layered on top of the “double consciousness” W.E.B. Du Bois described—is just one aspect of what Black women in predominantly white workplaces of all kinds endure. Cultural differences and unspoken norms can create the sense that colleagues are speaking on a frequency that requires a lobotomy to tune into. The hypervisibility that comes with being “the only one” can lead to constant second-guessing of our instincts. One unexpectedly chilly interaction or terse email can suddenly reframe an entire work relationship, slipping you into a parallel inverse universe where every kindness was actually a veiled attempt at sabotage. This anxiety-inducing, disturbing experience is fertile ground for horror, and would make the perfect basis for a thriller novel. That’s why it’s so disappointing that two recent books that attempt to unpack the unique dilemmas faced by Black women in the workplace fall flat.
These novels, Zakiya Dalila Harris’ The Other Black Girl and Wanda M. Morris’ All Her Little Secrets, do include familiar office microaggressions—subtle slights like being forced to engage in code-switching, or being mistaken for another Black colleague. But they both miss an opportunity to explore, through the eyes of a character who has an awareness of the chilling nature of her experience and her interactions with white antagonists, the deeper levels of mundane yet terrifying psychological warfare that Black women experience in white workplaces.
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