Strong Voices by Tonya Bolden

Author:Tonya Bolden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

Langston Hughes

FEBRUARY 1, 1902–MAY 22, 1967

SPEECH TO THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF AUTHORS AND DRAMATISTS, 1957

On the Blacklist All Our Lives

Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives.

On May 7, 1957, the fifty-five-year-old poet, playwright, novelist, and social activist Langston Hughes, a native of Joplin, Missouri, appeared on the panel “The Writer’s Position in America.” This was at New York City’s Alvin Theatre, at an event sponsored by the Authors’ League of America.

Langston Hughes had graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the school once known as “the black Princeton.” By the 1950s, Hughes was one of the best-known, most successful American writers. One of the innovators of poetry inspired by and rooted in the blues and jazz music, and also star of an artistic movement often called the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes had catapulted to fame in 1926 with the publication of his collection of poetry The Weary Blues. By then, Hughes, who as child and a teen had lived in several American cities (including Lawrence, Kansas; Topeka, Kansas; Cleveland, Ohio; and Washington, DC), had held down all kinds of jobs while waiting for that big break. He had been a truck farmer, a delivery boy, a busboy, a cook, a waiter. He had even had a stint as an assistant to Carter G. Woodson, the “Father of Black History.” Hughes had also seen some of the world as a sailor. That included some of France, Holland, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, and several countries in West Africa. All the while, he wrote! wrote! wrote! In 1924, two years before Weary Blues came out, Hughes made Harlem home.

The 1957 New York City panel Hughes took part in came in the aftermath of the second Red Scare (1946–1956). This was a time of great persecution of Americans known to be or thought to be “Reds”; that is, Communists: people who believed in the economic, social, and political ideologies of America’s archenemy, the Soviet Union. Many Americans, from federal government employees to Hollywood screenwriters, were investigated and subjected to Congressional hearings. They led to imprisonment for some.

More men and women, Communists and not, wound up on the “blacklist”; that is, they were shunned, ostracized. For example, the only way some blacklisted screenwriters got work was by writing under aliases.

In 1953, Langston Hughes had come before one of those Congressional hearings. Out of fear, he denounced his writings regarded as radical and said that his sympathies for the Soviet ideology had ended a few years earlier.

While the anti-Communist hysteria had waned when Langston Hughes spoke at the Alvin Theatre in 1957, there was still a chill in the air and concern about the writers being censored; that is, forced to delete things from their work in order to get published or produced.

Censorship was nothing new for the black writer, Hughes pointed out. He stressed how difficult it was for most black writers to get their manuscripts published or their plays staged by white-owned outlets. Black writers simply did not have the same access as white ones.

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