Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes - Essay Example

_________ ID: _____ ID: _____ Introduction It is often considered that despite all the poetic efforts in favor of Southern blacks, Langston Hughes's viewed south as if it were a huge nightmare. Unlike his fellow writers, he was not ready to welcome the Southern experience open heartedly, the cause was simple. What Langston sought and admire was the communal identity in Southern blacks. His work is the greatest evidence of the racial unity he experienced directly throughout his life and it was due to this experience that he served in strengthening the faith constructing an ideal America. Langston's sensitive nature was also responsible paradoxically in reinforcing his sense of separateness as a Negro. He acknowledged his race to be clearly an advantage, which gained him fame and recognition not only among his peers but also among those towards whom he was subjected towards color sensitivity, as it was his color that acknowledged and helped him in seeking his own identity in revealing the black experience. Langston Hughes was aware of the fact that being a black, his race would never be granted permission to gain access in participating in any effort towards America. He wanted the blacks to awake from the long sleep and start making the dream of their homeland a reality, although it was the dream which according to Langston was converted into a nightmare for Southern blacks, he aimed at rehabilitating that nightmare again into an American dream. The Spirit of the Black Community As Explored by Langston Hughes No doubt Langston Hughes was among one of those renaissance writers who produced little work on Harlem, but whatever they produced, the work emerged as a magnum opus in the Harlem Renaissance history and produced a true Harlem color. Langston Hughes, the Harlem writer was especially adept at portraying New York's ghetto life concerning about people, culture and religion. What he experienced during the renaissance enabled him to portray the true face of white Americans and in the form of words he described it. Langston's work about Harlem reveal his versatility as what he considered about the people and different communities confronted to Harlem. "He was also conscious of the circumstances and conditions African Americans had to face regarding social and economic factors of Harlem, he found a ready market among some blacks who wanted to read about life in the black metropolis on one hand, while on the other he was aware of those whites who were attracted to the exotic, strange, and colorful rhythms of 'nigger heaven'". (Wintz, 1988, p. 45) Harlem, though, was more than a playground for white Manhattan, for Africans it was more than a battle. A battle conducted not to loose, but to win and make whites acknowledge their identities as African Americans. "It was a teeming, overcrowded ghetto, and much of its laughter and gaiety only thinly veiled the misery and poverty that was becoming the standard of life for the new black urban masses. This, too, was reflected by the Harlem Renaissance, viewed from the perspective of Langston". (Wintz, 1988, p. 46) "Langston portrayed the outbreak of World War I as the only means, which intensified racial conflicts in America. He was aware of the sacrifices given by every single African of America and realized the importance of African traditional people in supporting America's war, with a hope that their efforts would display one day a result of loyalty and battlefield gallantry to win them popular support in their quest for equality". (Rampersad, 2002, p. 54) Langston encouraged their efforts to participate fully in their country's battles; blacks have traditionally confronted a government reluctant to accept their services. During World War I the already existing racial strife intensified these problems. Some poets saw Harlem slightly different as compared to other poets of Renaissance in a sense that unlike many would be black writers; Langston Hughes was strongly drawn to the black people of Harlem, which won the hearts of African Americans. "Impressed by the discipline and polish of the black men and women in Harlem, Langston made Fort Huachuca the subject of long articles published in the Defender. In turn, his listeners, which were the Africans of Harlem, were clearly impressed by him. In Tucson, Langston was able to speak to seven hundred people in one attempt" (Rampersad, 2002, p. 58). Rampersad describes his effort in The Life of Langston Hughes as, "as before, the Arizona landscape the desert blooming with poppies, gray-green cacti, purple sage, century plants, amid misty smoke trees; the sky blue and wide, under a scintillant sun touched something tender in him". Langston said, "I wonder why anybody lives anywhere except where it is warm and bright and beautiful" he mused in the Defender. "I wonder why I live in Harlem I don't know. But I do"." (Rampersad, 2002, p. 58) "Langston gave his undivided attention to the milieu and the people who he thought would shape the Harlem Renaissance and the people not only appreciated him but he was also considered and admired as a revolutionist poet in Harlem. His focus on the masses of black people made him a true 'Harlem Hero' in the eyes of his people. As in his autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston envisions at least two complementary narratives, a presumed line of history but also a cycle of the Redeemer; a story of things as people have seen them, a tale of what the writer imagines humans to become. With the publication of Ask Your Mama, in 1961, Langston had lived from one great movement of African American culture in the twentieth century the Harlem Renaissance to the second great one, the Black Arts Movement of the sixties and seventies. He encountered a curious blend of struggle for civil rights and opportunity for the creative arts". (Tracy, 2004, p. 121) Langston's impact on American history is as clear and transparent as his contributions towards Harlem are. Besides appearing on the top of the list of African American writers and poets, he introduced some of the most experimental forms of African American lyrics and music into our poetics of the twentieth century. During the despair of the Great Depression, he did not lag behind in presenting deceptively simple stories that would endure within and beyond his time. According to Tracy, "Neither the pessimism of the cold war of the 1950s nor the mainstream backlash to the civil rights movement of the sixties disillusioned him completely. He discerned a disturbing cycle of inhumanity within history, but not without laughter. A man for all seasons, he was especially a voice of the mid-twentieth century. His was a measured declaration on behalf of a most optimistic future. Thus, his words outlived his own century. He read the vicissitudes of history, often revealing the implications of it to fellows who lived with him within it. His historical imagination was for all time". (Tracy, 2004, p. 61) "In the beginning of the Renaissance, the black newcomers from rural South were confined to specific streets of the North, such as 119th between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, or to the relatively small rectangle created from 130th to 140th Streets between Fifth and Seventh Avenues. Although they often lived side by side with white residents, they were rarely welcomed. Some whites formed associations and drew up restrictive lease agreements. One such group, the Property Owners' Protective Association, which was organized in 1913, charged that blacks were not only poor tenants but also destructive ones, and caused real estate values to decline". (Greenberg, 1997, p. 11) "All the unspoken barriers came down when one of the best known black churches, 'St. Philip's Protestant Episcopal Church', moved from midtown Manhattan into a new edifice on West 133rd Street in 1910. The next year, St. Philip's purchased a row of apartment houses occupying all of the north side of 135th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues. Inexorably, as whites fled the area, blacks took over street after street, fanning out in all directions. On the one hand, the move into Harlem appeared to finally answer the black quest for a stable, unified neighborhood that they could call their own. But it was, on the other hand, a grim period for them. Langston felt their pain deep inside his heart as he considered himself among one of them. The move into Harlem coincided with another massive wave of European immigrants coming into the city, this time from the Mediterranean region. By the turn of the century, only 20,395 black males were gainfully employed, a mere eighteen for every thousand blacks in the city. And despite their overall total, blacks in Manhattan were so outnumbered by whites in 1910 that they represented only 2 percent of the island's population, and, as one black businessman wrote, immigrants occupy every industry that was confessedly the Negro's". (Greenberg, 1997, p. 43) "Italians, Sicilians, and Greeks have the bootblack stands, the newsstands, barbers' shops, waiters' situations, restaurants, catering business, stevedoring, steamboat work, and other situations occupied by Negroes". (Brandt, 1997, p. 28) "On one hand, Blacks had become even less of a significant factor in New York's economic life. On the other hand, the 1920s were also Harlem's Camelot of sorts, its Renaissance, when writers and poets such as McKay, Johnson, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes gave blacks throughout the United States a sense of their history and tradition, and voiced their yearnings. It was the period when, as Hughes put it as, 'the Negro was in vogue'." (Wintz, 1988, p. 124) As soon as the riots started in Harlem, calls for change rang out in every black community across the nation. A few weeks after the riot, four thousand delegates representing twenty-six states as well as nations as diverse as Germany, Japan, Mexico, and Cuba gathered in New York for the first American Writers' Congress where the opening session of the Congress was addressed by Langston Hughes. There he made the leaders realize the importance of Harlem Renaissance not only in the favor of Africans but also in the benefit of America. "Like all of Harlem, Negro Harlem was itself divided, not only geographically but also socially and economically. Even color, the variety of shadings of skin tone was a factor. Dark-skinned blacks looked down on light-skinned ones, whom they called 'high yallers.' Part of their attitude might have been prompted by jealousy, because many light-skinned blacks could pass for white. Northern born blacks snubbed the southern-born, who were often illiterate and displayed a subservience to whites that was expected in the South. Sugar Hill overlooked the Valley; a slum area extending from 130th to 140th Street east of Seventh Avenue, where most of Harlem's poor lived. But the Valley was also the center of Harlem's cultural life, a rich conglomeration of churches and community centers, dancehalls and nightclubs, schools and bookstores, theaters and businesses". (Wintz, 1988, p. 97) "Harlem Renaissance when analyzed, it is found that such crafted intersections are the consequences of the Great Depression like in the case of Harlem Renaissance and the spiritual resistance of African American blues to it in which the narrator shows a complexity of power dynamics. When social class and race divide people on the basis of interests, conflicts and power, the potential force of humanity diminishes in capacity to change the world. A state of 'Depression' is consequently a metaphor of history and of the human mind". (Janken, 1998, p. 487) The same happened in the case of Harlem. "It was not the first time Hughes had encountered that attitude, that a "talented tenth" must lead the masses to their salvation, sometimes through cultural capitulation and outright rejection of the beauty of their own cultural aesthetic and productions, sometimes through a reinterpretation and 'elevation' of those productions through Europeanization. But Hughes had made it clear as early as 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' that he had an unflagging admiration for the creativity, energy, unpretentiousness, and unselfconscious pride of the 'low-down folks.' They could lead him in the path of righteous artistry if only he could encompass the soul of their blues. These folks hold their individuality in the face of American standardization, and whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear. And they are not ashamed of him if they know he exists at all. And they accept what beauty is their own without question. Such feelings about the folk likely influenced Hughes to pursue his activities not only as a writer but also as a dramatist, where his work was meant to be spoken, performed as part of an oral tradition that involves the people immediately in his form". (Tracy, 2004, p. 145) Langston Hughes was not an author; he was a spokesman representing the true voice of African American masses and of democrats throughout the world. His stories encapsulate our struggle to remain human during the past centuries. "Everything that precedes the last sentence here, except for the finest points, can easily be reduced to its simple truth. A fine reward for writing about Langston Hughes is recognizing that we can express an appreciation of his stories in different words to diverse people. All of his audiences are worth writing for". (Tracy, 2004, p. 147) Like Trotter, writer, poet, and playwright Langston Hughes was out of New York when the riot took place, a fact that he regretted. He wrote a friend that he was sorry he had missed it. "Hughes seemed to be particularly tickled that upper-class blacks were embarrassed by the rioting. "I gather the mob was most uncouth-and Sugar Hill is shamed!" He told another, "The better class Negroes are all mad at the low class ones for the breaking and looting that went on." He said that letters he received from the better-colored people practically froth at the mouth. It seems their peace was disturbed even more than white folks. To still another friend, writer Carl Van Vechten, he wrote, "All the best colored people declare they have been set back Fifty Years. I don't know exactly from what"." (McMillan, 1940, p. 45) McMillan writes in 'Langston Hughes, The Big Sea' that how amazing the fact is that "Langston Hughes experienced a friendly curiosity from Europeans not only because of the skin color, but because of the notion that many Europeans, especially in small towns away from metropolitan areas, had never seen a black person. Others found that they were not recognized at all as Negro, as Lewis K. McMillan discovered his first few months in Berlin. Business associates and store clerks took him for Turkish or Japanese; an Indian acquaintance assumed he was from Siam; and some passersby thought he was Egyptian". (McMillan, 1940, p. 43) "Since he had come to Germany, he wrote in 1929, "I have been called by so many names that it is hard sometimes to determine what I really am"." (McMillan, 1940, p. 43) Langston created such a unique feeling of awareness among Negroes that the black community aimed at finding out their real customs after which the African American intellectuals recognized a link to their African heritage. "What the history revealed upon them were the facts that black people were much like themselves westernized, college-educated, cultivated, interested in searching out an African past, but perhaps disdainful of the African present. In contrast, though they felt a kinship with Africa, significant differences separated African Americans from the ancestral homeland. Langston Hughes's experiences of his 1923 trip to Africa as a seaman are instructive. Hughes's attention was first drawn to the sartorial exoticism of the residents of Dakar, his first stop in West Africa, where he was struck by what he termed their 'crudeness and absurdity'." (Janken, 1998, p. 487) As Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi has written, Hughes filtered his observations through the lens of 'a primitive' Africa according to classical exoticism: the sun, the jungle, wild animals, the drumbeat, dance, but also beauty, purity, and innocence." (Elizabeth, Chicago, p. 1) But when Hughes talked with Africans about colonial problems and told them that as a Negro he could understand their situation, he was stunned at their reply: "They only laughed at me and shook their heads and said: 'You, white man! You, white Man'!" (Janken, 1998, p. 487) According to Merret Tariq, "those engaging in the ridicule had no inkling of the black Harlem Renaissance or the spirit of Langston Hughes, which inspired us to talk of an African Renaissance. White South Africa still struggles to come to terms with and understand that 'their darker brothers' are not 'going to be eating in the kitchen no more when the company comes.' Today at a macro political level in South Africa the words of Langston Hughes often find great amplification. Hughes's expressions and insight into the human soul, the black experience and the daily struggles of working folk manifested in the microcosm of individual lives is also still as relevant as ever". (Merret, 2006a) "Langston was crafted in words, our struggles, our tears and laughter, our loves, our hopes, and our soul. He was a writer for all seasons capturing everything from the living to the dying, as well as that, which would impact in the future. The Spanish Civil War, Fascism and Nazism in Europe, the second World War and the McCarthy era all held challenges for Hughes. All of these challenges have revisited us in this first decade of the 21st century where intolerance abounds in a world dominated by right-leaning forces". (Merret, 2006a) Conclusion Langston Hughes, the first African American author that came forward to support Harlem Renaissance is also one of the last Negroes who is still remembered by millions of Americans today for what he did on his part to awake African Americans to accomplish their dream is worth to be remembered. He continued to assist the blacks in every possible way to not only gain their identical values but to acknowledge their identities in front of whites. Whites were used to see blacks with the stereotype images, Langston's work make them to view blacks apart from their general conception of Negroes presented in magazines, in films, and on the stage. When they viewed Negroes as a sensible mass, there was no way for whites other than to react with surprise what they found in Negroes of intelligence and ability. Ultimately, they had to acknowledge blacks as a part of America that possessed the right to contribute in American dream's participation. Behind the great war of Harlem Renaissance were the sacrifices and endless efforts of Langston Hughes, who would always be remembered by the Americans, particularly the black Americans. Work Cited Brandt Nat, 1997. "Harlem at War: The Black Experience in WWII": Syracuse University Press. Place of Publication: Syracuse, NY. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, 1992. "Harlem Renaissance and Africa: An Ambiguous Adventure," In "The Surreptitious Speech: Presence Africaine" and the Politics of Otherness, 1947-1987, ed. V. Y. Mudimbe :Chicago. Greenberg Lynn Cheryl, 1997. "Or Does It Explode: Black Harlem in the Great Depression": Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Janken R. Kenneth, 1998. "African American and Francophone Black Intellectuals during the Harlem Renaissance" in "The Historian". Volume: 60. Issue: 3. Page Number: 487+. COPYRIGHT 1998 McMillan K. Lewis, 1940. "Langston Hughes, The Big Sea". New York, 186-90 Merret Tariq Patric, 2006a Available from < http://www.lhcolloquy.com/pages/706207/index.htm > Rampersad Arnold, 2002. "The Life of Langston Hughes". Volume: 2. Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Tracy C. Steven, 2004. "A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes": Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Wintz D. Cary, 1988. "Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance": Rice University Press. Place of Publication: Houston, TX. Read More