by BILLY ANANIA
In the 1930s and ’40s, Langston Hughes wrote poetic tributes to the working class and socialist leaders worldwide. Some critics allege he abandoned his principles later in life, but they ignore the role of McCarthyist oppression — and Hughes’s creative resistance to it.
Few high-profile artists in the twentieth century were as openly socialist as renowned poet, playwright, and author Langston Hughes was in the 1930s and ’40s. Take, for example, these verses from a poetic tribute to Vladimir Lenin:
Lenin walks around the world.
Black, brown, and white receive him.
Language is no barrier.
The strangest tongues believe him.Lenin walks around the world.
The sun sets like a scar.
Between the darkness and the dawn
There rises a red star.
But by the mid-1960s, Hughes had changed his tune. Gone were the explicit homages to communism in the Soviet Union and China, replaced by stream-of-consciousness jazz poetry that more often referenced decolonial insurgencies in Africa.
Critics have argued that Hughes’s abrupt turn constituted an abandonment of his socialist values. This is complicated by the fact that for nearly a decade during the Second Red Scare, he was under investigation by Senator Joseph McCarthy for his communist affiliations and sympathies, which helps explain the shift in his tone.
This criticism also obscures consistencies in Hughes’s earlier and later work. At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Hughes was once again reflecting on African self-determination after a lifetime advocating against colonialism, segregation, lynching, fascism, and class warfare. The anti-colonial wars against Europe were thus extensions of a racial dilemma he critiqued throughout his career, and the assassinations of Patrice Lumumba and several other leaders left the aging Hughes lamenting struggles that would continue after his own death. Many of these African revolutionaries were themselves poets who were influenced by the art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance.
From his earliest poems in the 1920s, Hughes understood that race and class oppression were inextricably linked with capitalism and slavery. Raised in the Jim Crow era and radicalized during the Great Depression, he observed widespread inequality during the last gasps of industrialization, from racialized police violence to labor exploitation and forced vagrancy. He channeled these struggles into verse, writing across class and color lines. For inspiration, he looked to the workers of the world.
Hughes transformed political frustration into radical affirmations that still inspire individuals to collective action. While many historians have focused specifically on his poetry about US and Soviet politics, Hughes’s vast archive reveals not just the dangers black artists faced for expressing their political views but the need to detangle a literary giant from his liberal institutional legacy.
Jacobin Mag for more