Happy Birthday Langston Hughes!

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series celebrated the birthday of Langston Hughes (which was Feb. 1, 1902) with a book discussion of any biography or autobiography of Hughes, followed by the film Hughes's Dream Harlem, which was fantastic. Eight people attended the discussion and 21 people enjoyed the film.

2002 DVD Hughes's Dream Harlem featured Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Talib Kweli, and others 

I read a biography written for teens, Langston Hughes: the Harlem Renaissance by Maurice Wallace which was succinct and included all the pertinent facts. I then attempted to read the definitive biography written by Arnold Rampersad. I picked up Volume 2 of Rampersad's work, thinking I would get more information concerning Hughes' participation in the Civil Rights Movement ( or the curious lack of participation according to the Wallace book), however I really didn't get much more information at all.

Our facilitator read Black Troubadour: Langston Hughes by Charlamae Rollins. Ms. Rollins was obviously a friend of Mr. Hughes and treated him very gently, leaving out anything he wouldn't have desired written about him. We all agreed that this strategy would make the biography somewhat biased.

So the main question for the discussion was: What did you learn about Langston Hughes that you didn't know before? Here is a sampling of the answers:

Shelara: I didn't know he had a relative who had fought alongside John Brown or that he had a relative who was a congressman.

Lynda: I didn't know that he was shuffled between his mother and grandmother or that they lived in Kansas and Ohio. I thought he always lived in New York.

Stacy: Charlotte Mason wanted him to write a certain way, just like his father tried to control him. Shelara replied to this that Paul Lawrence Dunbar had died young and broke because he wanted to write a preferred style of poetry but had been stuck writing dialect, (because his initial success had been in dialect.)

We all discussed how lonely Hughes was a child living with his grandmother and agreed that particular type of solitude led to his creativity. Stacy said that it was in that solitude that he embraced books.

Stacy read Hughes' first autobiography, The Big Sea. He stated that he had read Rampersad's Volume 1, but it had no humor. Stacy read from The Big Sea during our discussion. The passage was the hilarious "firing" of Bruce the Chef in Paris.


Stacy found it strange that in The Big Sea, Hughes mentioned nothing about his radicalism. It was only in reading the Rampersad biography that he learned about Hughes being enamored with the Russians, that was until he learned about how the Russians treated the darker skinned Ubezistans.

Of course the topic of Hughes' sexuality came up in our discussion and we were all quite surprised that Hughes was not gay, as we had all assumed but that he had a specific love affair with a girl in Africa until her father made it end. Stacy said that he would often visit the houses of ill-repute, to which Shelara replied "wasn't that because he wanted room and board?"

For the sake of being thorough, I had to point out that the book I read, Langston Hughes: The Harlem Renaissance, the writer said that Mr. Hughes had had romantic involvements with both men and women. Rampersad, Hughes' definitive biographer called him "asexual."

The overall consensus is that Langston Hughes really had a sense of blackness and even though he obviously had mixed ancestry he embraced his blackness and made the love of black people the focus of his writing.