Happy Birthday Mr. Hughes

Hold fast to dreams



For if dreams die


Life is a broken-winged bird


That cannot fly.


Hold fast to dreams


For when dreams go


Life is a barren field


Frozen with snow.


Dreams by Langston Hughes



Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri the second child of school teacher Carrie "Caroline" Mercer Langston and her husband James Nathaniel Hughes. Both parents were mixed race and Langston Hughes was of African American, European American and Native American descent. He grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns. Both his paternal and maternal great-grandmothers were African American, and both his paternal and maternal great-grandfathers were white: one of Scottish and one of Jewish descent.

Hughes as a Baby

More Things About His Ancestry.... Hughes was named after both his father and his grand-uncle, John Mercer Langston who, in 1888, became the first African American to be elected to the United States Congress from Virginia. Hughes' maternal grandmother Mary Patterson was of African American, French, English and Native American descent. One of the first women to attend Oberlin College, she first married Lewis Sheridan also of mixed race. He joined the men in John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 and died from his wounds.


Hughes worked various odd jobs, before serving a brief tenure as a crewman aboard the S.S. Malone in 1923, spending six months traveling to West Africa and Europe. 

During his time in England in the early 1920s, Hughes became part of the black expatriate community. In November 1924, Hughes returned to the U. S. to live with his mother in Washington, D.C. Hughes worked at various odd jobs before gaining a white-collar job in 1925 as a personal assistant to the historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. As the work demands limited his time for writing, Hughes quit the position to work as a busboy in a hotel.

There he encountered the poet Vachel Lindsay, with whom he shared some poems. Impressed with the poems, Lindsay publicized his discovery of a new black poet. By this time, Hughes' earlier work had been published in magazines and was about to be collected into his first book of poetry.The following year, Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University, a historically black university in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He joined the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, a black fraternal organization founded at Howard University in Washington, D.C.


After Hughes earned a B.A. degree from Lincoln University in 1929, he returned to New York. Except for travels to the Soviet Union and parts of the Caribbean, Hughes lived in Harlem as his primary home for the remainder of his life.





Just Maybe? I admit I have read and heard accusations about Langston Hughes being a homosexual there is nothing wrong that. But some sources say it was true and others say that it wasn't. Although there could have been some hidden messages in his poetry. Some academics and biographers today believe that Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, similar in manner to Walt Whitman. Hughes has Whitman as his influence. Hughes' story "Blessed Assurance" deals with a father's anger over his son's effeminacy and "queerness." But in order retain the respect and support of black churches and organizations and avoid exacerbating his precarious financial situation, Hughes remained closeted.  Arnold Rampersad  was the primary biographer for Hughes, determined that Hughes exhibited a preference for other African-American men in his work and life.

Then Again? However, Rampersad denies Hughes' homosexuality in his biography. Rampersad concludes that Hughes was probably asexual and passive in his sexual relationships. He did, however show a respect and love for his fellow black man (and woman). Other scholars argue for Hughes' homosexuality: his love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover.



Langston Hughes died on May 22, 1967 he died from complications after abdominal surgery, related to prostate cancer at the age of 65.  The ashes from his body are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer leading to the auditorium named for him within the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.The design on the floor covering his cremated remains is an African cosmogram titled Rivers. The title is taken from his poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". Within the center of the cosmogram, above his ashes, is the line: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." That happens to be my favorite poem written by Langston Hughes. May he rest in peace he is certaintly an influential man in the world of writing and Harlem Rennisance culture.