Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was an African-American poet born in 1902 and died in 1967. He was a remarkable man. His poetry was often very political.

He witnessed discrimination and hatred against blacks. He saw rampant poverty during the Depression of the 1930's, especially among his people. He, like many frustrated people of this time, saw Communism and the solutions it offered as attractive.

He seems to have been a believing Christian, but he wondered in verse where God was while his people suffered so, kind of like Elie Wiesel while he was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. Hughes went so far as to write a poem liking God to a man sleeping in a back alley with a gin bottle in his hand. He tells God to get up and fight like a man (presumably to alleviate the suffering of his people and many others.)

I first came across Hughes some 12 years ago while I was reading a book on the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Hughes wrote a number of poems favoring the duly-elected Republic which was being besieged and later trampled by the Fascist army under Francisco Franco.

Apparently Hughes spent significant time in Spain during this time as a journalist. Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell did as well. Orwell fought on the Republic's side and later denounced the Stalinist Communists who supported the Republic but were mainly interested in their own agenda.

Langston became quite fluent in Spanish; he had spent time in other Spanish-speaking countries too. He translated some of Federico Garcia-Lorca's poetry to English, which was no small feat as Lorca's poetry is quite complex. (He wrote Romance Gitano - Gypsy Song, and Bodas de Sangre - Blood Wedding.)

The Fascists captured and murdered Garcia-Lorca because he was a homosexual and they thought Spain should only be populated by masculine men and not effeminate ones. Spain was deprived of a great poet.

Anyway, Hughes accomplished a lot for an African-American of his time, considering the strikes against him by white society. He said he felt accepted in Spain, but not so in the U.S. He died of complications due to prostate surgery. He was acquainted with writers like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, as well as being a part of the Harlem literary group of the time. He is missed.