The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s. During this period Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars. Many had come from the South, fleeing its oppressive caste system in order to find a place where they could freely express their talents. Among those artists whose works achieved recognition were Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer, Walter White and James Weldon Johnson. W.E.B. Du Bois encouraged talented artists to leave the South. Du Bois, then the editor of THE CRISIS magazine, the journal of the NAACP, was at the height of his fame and influence in the black community. THE CRISIS published the poems, stories, and visual works of many artists of the period. The Renaissance was more than a literary movement: It involved racial pride, fueled in part by the militancy of the "New Negro" demanding civil and political rights. The Renaissance incorporated jazz and the blues, attracting whites to Harlem speakeasies, where interracial couples danced. But the Renaissance had little impact on breaking down the rigid barriers of Jim Crow that separated the races. While it may have contributed to a certain relaxation of racial attitudes among young whites, perhaps its greatest impact was to reinforce race pride among blacks. -- Richard Wormser http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_harlem.html Hughes's Life and Career Photo by Carl Van Vechten Arnold Rampersad Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas, but also lived in Illinois, Ohio, and Mexico. By the time Hughes enrolled at Columbia University in New York, he had already launched his literary career with his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" in the Crisis, edited by W E. B. Du Bois. He had also committed himself both to writing and to writing mainly about African Americans. Hughes's sense of dedication was instilled in him most of all by his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, whose first husband had died at Harpers Ferry as a member of John Brown's band, and whose second husband (Hughes's grandfather) had also been a militant abolitionist. Another important family figure was John Mercer Langston, a brother of Hughes's grandfather who was one of the best-known black Americans of the nineteenth century. At the same time, Hughes struggled with a sense of desolation fostered by parental neglect. He himself recalled being driven early by his loneliness 'to books, and the wonderful world in books.’ Leaving Columbia in 1922, Hughes spent the next three years in a succession of menial jobs. But he also traveled abroad. He worked on a freighter down the west coast of Africa and lived for several months in Paris before returning to the United States late in 1924. By this time, he was w ...

1. The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural,
social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem between
the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s. During this
period Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers,
artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars. Many had
come from the South, fleeing its oppressive caste system in
order to find a place where they could freely express their
talents. Among those artists whose works achieved recognition
were Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, Countee Cullen and
Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer, Walter
White and James Weldon Johnson. W.E.B. Du Bois encouraged
talented artists to leave the South. Du Bois, then the editor of
THE CRISIS magazine, the journal of the NAACP, was at the
height of his fame and influence in the black community. THE
CRISIS published the poems, stories, and visual works of many
artists of the period. The Renaissance was more than a literary
movement: It involved racial pride, fueled in part by the
militancy of the "New Negro" demanding civil and political
rights. The Renaissance incorporated jazz and the blues,
attracting whites to Harlem speakeasies, where interracial
couples danced. But the Renaissance had little impact on
breaking down the rigid barriers of Jim Crow that separated the
races. While it may have contributed to a certain relaxation of
racial attitudes among young whites, perhaps its greatest impact
was to reinforce race pride among blacks.
-- Richard Wormser
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_harlem.html

2. Hughes's Life and Career
Photo by Carl Van Vechten
Arnold Rampersad
Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes grew up
mainly in Lawrence, Kansas, but also lived in Illinois, Ohio,
and Mexico.
By the time Hughes enrolled at Columbia University in New
York, he had already launched his literary career with his poem
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" in the Crisis, edited by W E. B.
Du Bois. He had also committed himself both to writing and to
writing mainly about African Americans.
Hughes's sense of dedication was instilled in him most of all by
his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, whose first husband
had died at Harpers Ferry as a member of John Brown's band,
and whose second husband (Hughes's grandfather) had also been
a militant abolitionist. Another important family figure was
John Mercer Langston, a brother of Hughes's grandfather who
was one of the best-known black Americans of the nineteenth
century. At the same time, Hughes struggled with a sense of
desolation fostered by parental neglect. He himself recalled
being driven early by his loneliness 'to books, and the
wonderful world in books.’
Leaving Columbia in 1922, Hughes spent the next three years in
a succession of menial jobs. But he also traveled abroad. He
worked on a freighter down the west coast of Africa and lived
for several months in Paris before returning to the United States
late in 1924. By this time, he was well known in African
American literary circles as a gifted young poet.
His major early influences were Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg,
as well as the black poets Paul Laurence Dunbar, a master of
both dialect and standard verse, and Claude McKay, a radical
socialist who also wrote accomplished lyric poetry. However,
Sandburg, who Hughes later called "my guiding star," was

3. decisive in leading him toward free verse and a radically
democratic modernist aesthetic.
His devotion to black music led him to novel fusions of jazz and
blues with traditional verse in his first two books, The Weary
Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). His emphasis
on lower-class black life, especially in the latter, led to harsh
attacks on him in the black press. With these books, however,
he established himself as a major force of the Harlem
Renaissance. In 1926, in the Nation, heprovided the movement
with a manifesto when he skillfully argued the need for both
race pride and artistic independence in his most memorable
essay, 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."
By this time, Hughes had enrolled at the historically black
Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, from which he would
graduate in 1929. In 1927 he began one of the most important
relationships of his life, with his patron Mrs. Charlotte Mason,
or "Godmother," who generously supported him for two years.
She supervised the writing of his first novel, Not Without
Laughter (1930)--about a sensitive, black midwestern boy and
his struggling family. However, their relationship collapsed
about the time the novel appeared, and Hughes sank into a
period of intense personal unhappiness and disillusionment.
One result was his firm turn to the far left in politics. During a
year (1932-1933) spent in the Soviet Union, he wrote his most
radical verse. A year in Carmel, California, led to a collection
of short stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934). This volume
is marked by pessimism about race relations, as well as a
sardonic realism.
After his play Mulatto, on the twinned themes of miscegenation
and parental rejection, opened on Broadway in 1935, Hughes
wrote other plays, including comedies such as Little Ham
(1936) and a historical drama, Emperor of Haiti (1936). Most of
these plays were only moderate successes. In 1937 he spent
several months in Europe, including a long stay in besieged
Madrid. In 1938 he returned home to found the Harlem Suitcase
Theater, which staged his agitprop drama Don't You Want to Be

4. Free? The play, employing several of his poems, vigorously
blended black nationalism, the blues, and socialist exhortation.
The same year, a socialist organization published a pamphlet of
his radical verse, "A New Song."
With World War II, Hughes moved more to the center
politically. His first volume of autobiography, The Big Sea
(1940), written in an episodic, lightly comic manner, made
virtually no mention of his leftist sympathies. In his book of
verse Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) he once again sang the
blues. On the other hand, this collection, as well as another, his
Jim Crow’s Last Stand (1943), strongly attacked racial
segregation.
Perhaps his finest literary achievement during the war came in
the course of writing a weekly column in the Chicago Defender
that began in 1942 and lasted twenty years. The highlight of the
column was an offbeat Harlem character called Jesse B. Semple,
or Simple, and his exchanges with a staid narrator in a
neighborhood bar, where Simple commented on a variety of
matters but mainly about race and racism. Simple became
Hughes's most celebrated and beloved fictional creation, and the
subject of five collections edited by Hughes, starting in 1950
with Simple Speaks His Mind.
Hughes with students in Atlanta during
Negro History Week, 1947.
Photo: Griffith J. Davis.
Online Source
After the war, two books of verse, Fields of Wonder (1947) and
One-Way Ticket (1949), added little to his fame. However, in
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) he broke new ground with
verse accented by the discordant nature of the new bebop jazz
that reflected a growing desperation in the black urban
communities of the North. At the same time, Hughes's career
was vexed by constant harassment by right-wing forces about
his ties to the Left. In vain he protested that he had never been a
Communist and had severed all such links. In 1953 he suffered a
public humiliation at the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy,

5. who forced him to appear in Washington, D.C., and testify
officially about his politics. Hughes denied that he had ever
been a party member but conceded that some of his radical
verse had been ill-advised.
Hughes's career hardly suffered from this episode. Within a
short time McCarthy himself was discredited and Hughes was
free to write at length about his years in the Soviet Union in I
Wonder as I Wander (1956), his much-admired second volume
of autobiography. He became prosperous, although he always
had to work hard for his measure of prosperity and sometimes
called himself, with good cause, a 'literary sharecropper.’
In the 1950s he constantly looked to the musical stage for
success, as he sought to repeat his major coup of the 1940s,
when Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice had chosen him as the lyricist
for their Street Scene (1947). This production was hailed as a
breakthrough in the development of American opera; for
Hughes, the apparently endless cycle of poverty into which he
had been locked came to an end. He bought a home in Harlem.
The Simple books inspired a musical show, Simply Heavenly
(1957), that met with some success. However, Hughes's
Tambourines to Glory (1963), a gospel musical play satirizing
corruption in a black storefront church, failed badly, with some
critics accusing him of creating caricatures of black life.
Nevertheless, his love of gospel music led to other acclaimed
stage efforts, usually mixing words, music, and dance in an
atmosphere of improvisation. Notable here were the Christmas
show Black Nativity (1961) and, inspired by the civil rights
movement, Jericho--Jim Crow (1964).
For Hughes, writing for children was important. Starting with
the successful Popo and Fifina (1932), a tale set in Haiti and
written with Arna Bontemps, he eventually published a dozen
children's books, on subjects such as jazz, Africa, and the West
Indies. Proud of his versatility, he also wrote a commissioned
history of the NAACP and the text of a much praised pictorial
history of black America. His text in The Sweet Flypaper of
Life (1955), where he explicated photographs of Harlem by Roy

6. DeCarava, was judged masterful by reviewers, and confirmed
Hughes's reputation for an unrivaled command of the nuances of
black urban culture.
The 1960s saw Hughes as productive as ever. In 1962 his
ambitious book-length poem Ask Your Mama, dense with
allusions to black culture and music, appeared. However, the
reviews were dismissive. Hughes's work was not as universally
acclaimed as before in the black community. Although he was
hailed in 1966 as a historic artistic figure at the First World
Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, he also found himself
increasingly rejected by young black militants at home as the
civil rights movement lurched toward Black Power. His last
book was the volume of verse, posthumously published, The
Panther and the Lash (1967), mainly about civil rights. He died
in May that year in New York City.
In many ways Hughes always remained loyal to the principles
he had laid down for the younger black writers in 1926. His art
was firmly rooted in race pride and race feeling even as he
cherished his freedom as an artist. He was both nationalist and
cosmopolitan. As a radical democrat, he believed that art should
be accessible to as many people as possible. He could
sometimes be bitter, but his art is generally suffused by a keen
sense of the ideal and by a profound love of humanity,
especially black Americans. He was perhaps the most original
of African American poets and, in the breadth and variety of his
work, assuredly the most representative of African American
writers.
From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature.
Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press.
THEME FOR ENGLISH B
By Langston Hughes
The instructor said,

7. Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you---
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me---we two---you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York too.) Me---who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records---Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white---
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,

8. I guess you learn from me---
although you're older---and white---
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
1951
AlTorkestani
Mojahed AlTorkestani
English 1020
Dr.Rebecca
01/28/16
Langston Hughes
The social, historical, and cultural contexts are influencing
factors of poetic movements. To comprehend this, perceive
literature, for example, poetry, are not made in a vacuum but
rather are the result of numerous impacts that influence the
ways in which the poets compose and the courses in which the
audience reads and decipher their work. This paper is an
analysis of poem “Theme for English B,” by famed poet
Langston Hughes in its social, historical, and cultural context.
The segregation in America influenced the writers to write
about the issues of discrimination in their poetry paving way for
the rise of the Harlem Renaissance.
In the poem, ‘Theme for English B’ he introduces the
predicament of the African American scholar in the era of Jim
Crow Laws. The poetic narrative fixates on a youthful student
whose teacher has requested that he compose a page about
himself with the proviso that the page should be "valid." The
speaker considers himself; taking note of that he is twenty-two
years of age, "coloured," and a student in a New York Collage.
As he strolls home, he understands that he is the only

9. "coloured" learner in his class. This was a typical event during
the discriminatice Jim Crow time, since African Americans had
more trouble getting access into first class schools than their
white companions (Pbs.org).
Hughes dependably stayed faithful to the standards he had set
down for the more youthful black scholars in 1926 (Rampersad).
In his paper 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain', he
pursues the disconnect that exists between the middle and high-
class African American families had where the high-class
families were more white than 'coloured' (Hughes, 31).
However, despite the aping of these families now of them was
free from the affliction of racism. This is evident in the poem
where the speaker identifies himself with Harlem. He could hear
the sounds of Harlem in the New York Streets. This implies that
the pains of racism are felt on all levels.
Langston's specialty was immovably established in race pride
and race feeling. He is attributed as a propagator of the Harlem
Renaissance. There was both patriot and cosmopolitan. As a
radical democrat, he trusted that art ought to be open to
whatever number individuals as could be allowed. He could here
and there be intense; however, his craft is suffused by a sharp
feeling of the perfect and by a significant adoration for
humankind, particularly black Americans. In ‘Theme for
English B’, Hughes addresses issues the vast majority of
America was constituent to imagine did not exist. Racial
relations, class divergence, and different types of social
stratification were ideas outside the perfect "America" of myth
and revisionist memory. He brings up that "being coloured
doesn't make me not care for the same things different people
like who are different races," indicating the way that Americans
had significantly more in like manner in mainstream culture at
any rate than they may have envisioned. It was his belief that
the all individuals were equal and color should not be
something to be ashamed rather it should be appreciated.
In conclusion, Langston Hughes was a propagator of the Harlem

10. movement and a keen fighter against racial discrimination. The
times of discriminative Jim Crow laws and the Harlem
Renaissance are prominent in his poetry there by reaffirming the
social, historical and cultural contexts as influenced in the
poetic movements. Through this poem, Langston Hughes affirms
that there are various types of Americans, and there is no
particular characterizing "American" experience. White or
black, old or young, free or oppressed– all can take a stab at a
bit of the American Dream. This sonnet is along these lines a
great deal more idealistic than some of Hughes' later works on
this topic.
Work Cited
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”
1926." The Collected Works of Langston Hughes 9 (1773): 31-
36.
Pbs.org,. "The Rise And Fall Of Jim Crow. Jim Crow Stories.
The Harlem Renaissance | PBS". Web. 2 Feb. 2016.
Rampersad, Arnold. "Hughes's Life And Career--By Arnold
Rampersad". English.illinois.edu. Web. 2 Feb. 2016.