Langston Hughes Influence On The Harlem Renaissance

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Langston Hughes was an African-American novelist, poet and composer. He was born on February 1, 1902, in Missouri. He went to the Columbia University after he got his high school degree in 1920. Afterwards, he traveled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. Hughes wrote several literary works such as The Weary Blues (1926) and Not Without Laughter (1930) that was his first novel (Kutzinski, 2012). Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Walt Whitman were the main authors that influenced Langston Hughes. Today, Langston Hughes is recognized as one of the most important writers because of the major role that he played to defend Black people’s cause. He was a well-known activist of the Harlem Renaissance that was an African American artistic movement in …show more content…
The activists of that movement used different sorts of arts such as poems, music and paintings to reconceptualize “the Negro” that was part of a minority and victims of prejudices and stereotypes from Whites in the society. This movement influenced many writers all over the world especially francophone writers from Africa and Caribbean islands. Hughes had a big implication and influence on the Harlem Renaissance and, like most of the activists in the movement had a strong sense of racial pride. Throughout his literary works, Hughes tried to defend and restore the “black pride” by promoting equality, by condemning racism, and by celebrating African American culture. To begin, the Harlem Renaissance or the Negro movement was a literary, artistic and intellectual movement between the 1920s to the mid-1930s. This movement wanted to promote a new black cultural identity (Haugen, 2006). Several writers and musicians such as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Jessie Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston were a part of the numerous activists that marked the history of the movement that took place in Harlem, which is located in New …show more content…
In spite of wide travels, prodigious talent and his social educational background, his works reflected African- American folk speech and culture (Kutzinski, 2012). Additionally, as he showed in one of his famous poems “My America”, he was influenced by his background. Hughes’s commitment to African-American cause began when his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was published in the Crisis that was magazine that spread concerns about African Americans and NAACP policies (Kutzinski, 2012). He was also influenced by his grandmother, his grandfather and great uncle who were abolitionists and encouraged him in his dedication to African-American cause. The question of racial boundaries was one of the main concern that was distinguishable in Langston Hughes’s poetry. He believed that all man were equal and that they should be equally treated and should get the same opportunities. Langston Hughes understood that the American experience was different for her black and white citizens because African Americans were discriminated, oppressed, and legally classified as second-class citizens (Blogpost, 2012).For several years African-American were slaves in the American continent and suffered a lot because they were treated like animals. Oppression has been a phenomenon that has contently present in black people’s life in America.
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