Announcements

FROM: The Office of Multicultural Affairs and Diversity Education RE: Celebrate Black History Month- Langston Hughes- American Poet
Sent:
2/22/2019 9:11:33 AM
To: Students, Faculty, Staff

 

Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people - the beauty within themselves.

-Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes, an African-American writer, known for his poetry, plays, and novels, to name a few. James Mercer Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. He was raised by his mother with the help of his grandmother, moving half a dozen times before finally settling in Cleveland, Ohio after the death of his grandmother. His first acclaimed poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was published the summer after his high school graduation in 1921. In 1922, after attending Colombia University, Hughes fell in love with Harlem, which he referred to as the “great dark city.” While working at a hotel 1926, Hughes was discovered by a prominent, White poet, and won a scholarship to attend Lincoln University, located in Pennsylvania. Other milestones he accomplished that year included publishing “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and receiving the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Award. Hughes was equally criticized and celebrated for his brutally honest portrayal of African-American culture in his own works. According to ThePoetryFoundation.org, Hughes “sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes.” Despite his critics, Hughes was one of the most influential figures of the “Harlem Renaissance,” known as the “black cultural mecca in the early 20th century”. Hughes died in New York, New York on May 22, 1967. A collection of poems written by Hughes called The Panther, and the Lash was published posthumously. This work confronted and reflected on the racial politics of the Black Panther movement.

To learn more about Langston Hughes and see his full body of work visit:

 https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/langston-hughes

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Langston-Hughes

https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/harlem-renaissance

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/langston-hughes