Langston Hughes is one of the great figures in C20th American history. Poet, playwright, novelist who stood on the side of the people, his writings during the 1930s and beyond are brilliant, passionate, fighting words.

He often wrote about everyday life for black Americans in Harlem, and he used the African-American dialect he heard around him. A form known as ‘jazz poetry’ emerged from this.

He was very much on the left, and strongly internationalist, but in 1953 denied before McCarthy’s sub-committee on subversion that he was a communist. He refused to dob people in, and stuck to good left-wing values: opposition to racism, support for democracy, and opposition to black nationalism within the civil rights struggle in the US in the 1960s.

Of course, the McCarthyite anti-communists had reason to regard him as a ‘Red’. He had visited the Soviet Union in 1932, wrote favourably about its industrial achievements and absence of the kind of racism he experienced in his homeland.

During this period of his writing, he wrote a poem called ‘Good morning, Revolution’:

GOOD MORNING, REVOLUTION

Good-morning, Revolution:

You’re the very best friend

I ever had.

We gonna pal around together from now on.

Listen, Revolution,

We’re buddies, see—

Together,

We can take everything:

Factories, arsenals, houses, ships

Railroads, forests, fields, orchards,

Bus lines, telegraphs, radios

(Jesus! Raise hell with radios!)

Steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, gas,

All the tools of production,

(Great day in the morning!)

Everything—

And turn ‘em over to the people who work.

Rule and run ‘em for us people who work.

_ _ _ _ _

Anyone needed inspiration about how a mass movement for justice can develop and grow – and win! – should read his 1962 history of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, ‘Fight for Freedom’.

One of his last poems was called ‘Backlash Blues’ and was made into a song by Nina Simone:

THE BACKLASH BLUES

Mister Backlash, Mister Backlash,
Just who do you think I am?
You raise my taxes, freeze my wages,
Send my son to Vietnam.

You give me second class houses,
Second class schools.
Do you think that colored folks
Are just second class fools?

When I try to find a job
To earn a little cash,
All you got to offer
Is a white backlash.

But the world is big,
Big and bright and round–
And it’s full of folks like me who are
Black, Yellow, Beige, and Brown.

Mister Backlash, Mister Backlash,
What do you think I got to lose?
I’m gonna leave you, Mister Backlash,
Singing your mean old backlash blues.

You’re the one
Will have the blues.
not me–
Wait and see!

_ _ _ _ _

After World War Two, he could see how the expectations for equal opportunity and an end to racial discrimination on the part of African-Americans could lead to violence if progress was not made quickly.

‘A dream deferred’ is one of my favourites, and I have attempted to recite it:

Hughes is a popular cultural figure in the US today. He is ‘claimed’ by many disparate groups – including the US Postal Service! – but many have reinvented him as a ‘social justice activist’ rather than celebrate him as a one-time socialist revolutionary.

What would he think of America today? He would be enthralled by the progress since the 1960s but would still be there, in the front lines of the struggle for equal opportunity. He would have no time for victimology – he hated the victimizers but in his writings asserted the need for blacks never to succumb to thinking of themselves as victims. He would have no time for the black nationalists, too, and would still see the importance of the need expressed in his ‘Letter to the South’:

White worker,
Here is my hand.

Today,
We’re Man to Man.