There Was a Party for Langston

Langston Hughes was a poet, author, and activist. He was born in 1901 and died in 1967. Though he was raised in Missouri and Illinois, he spent time living, traveling, and working in Mexico, Africa, and Europe. He attended Columbia University, which is in uptown Manhattan just south of West Harlem, and ultimately left due to racial prejudices. In a 1926 poem titled “Disillusion,” Hughes calls Harlem the “great dark city” and comments on both the “wild laughter / Of [Harlem’s] mirth” and “the salt tears / Of [Harlem’s] pain” (Hughes, Langston. “Disillusion.” Poets.org). These lines show how Hughes recognizes both the joy and community of Harlem and the “pain” of primarily Black residents experiencing systemic hardship, oppression, and racism.

Vachel Lindsay, a famous white poet, “discovered” Hughes when he visited a Washington, DC, restaurant where Hughes worked as a young busboy. Hughes showed some of his poetry to Lindsay. Soon after, Lindsay used his literary connections to promote Hughes’s work (“An Ordinary Shawl With an Extraordinary Story.” Ohio History Connection). Hughes began winning awards and drawing more notice. He wrote about the experience of Black Americans and advocated for Black literature.

Throughout his life, he continued to travel and publish widely in many textual forms—poetry, short stories, newspaper writing, and English translations of Spanish poets. He also founded several theater companies, one of which was in Harlem. In addition to the poems referenced throughout this guide, Hughes’s creative breadth is apparent in works like Not Without Laughter (1930), a fictional bildungsroman; The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926), an essay about Blackness and creativity; The Ways of White Folks (1934), a short story collection; and Mulatto (1935), a play about racism and colorism in the United States.

These prolific artistic activities, as well as Hughes’s innovations in poetic forms like jazz poetry, made him an important figure in a cultural movement called the Harlem Renaissance. “Renaissance” is French for “rebirth,” and the Harlem Renaissance was a rebirth of Black art and culture in the post-enslavement United States. Alain Locke, a writer, critic, and teacher known as the “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance, described the time as a “spiritual coming of age” where Black Americans transformed “social disillusionment to race pride” (“A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance.” The National Museum of African American History and Culture). Harlem was at the epicenter of the movement at its height, with Black-run publishers, newspapers, music companies, playhouses, nightclubs, and cabarets (“A New African American Identity”).

The Harlem Renaissance was interdisciplinary; while There Was a Party for Langston features literary figures, many important figures were from other disciplines. For instance, Marcus Garvey and Alain Locke were political activists; Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and Ma Rainey were musicians; Josephine Baker was a multi-hyphenate entertainer; and Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, and James Van Der Zee were visual artists or photographers. Many leaders played several roles. For instance, W. E. B. Du Bois, who is one of the authors embodied in books within the library who listens and watches the party for Langston, was a sociologist, historian, and activist who published an influential book called The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.

The Harlem Renaissance built upon earlier traditions and influenced Black literature to come thereafter, as well as the broader consciousness. The Harlem Renaissance thus embodies Artistic Inspiration and Its Influence Across Generations. Many of the authors listening in on the party for Langston in the library were either part of or influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. Some, like Paul Lawrence Dunbar (“An Ante-Bellum Sermon,” “We Wear the Mask,” and “Sympathy”), set the stage for the Harlem Renaissance. Besides Du Bois, Harlem Renaissance authors listening in on the party include Countee Cullen (“Incident,” “In the Dark Tower”), Alice Dunbar Nelson (“I Sit and Sew”), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Claude McKay (“The Harlem Dancer,” “If We Must Die,” “America”), and Richard Wright (Native Son).

Additional authors inspired by the Harlem Renaissance represented in the books in There Was a Party for Langston include James Baldwin (fiction, Giovanni’s Room, If Beale Street Could Talk; nonfiction and essay collections, No Name in the Street, The Fire Next Time, and Notes of a Native Son; short stories, “Sonny’s Blues”; plays, Blues for Mister Charlie), Gwendolyn Brooks (Maud Martha, “We Real Cool”), Ashley Bryan (writer and illustrator of children’s books such as Beat the Story Drum, Pum-Pum, and Beautiful Blackbird), Octavia Butler (the Parable duology, the Patternist quartet, Kindred), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), Nikki Giovanni (“Rosa Parks,” “Knoxville, Tennessee,” “Mothers”), Alex Haley (Roots, The Autobiography of Malcolm X), Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved), and Alice Walker (The Color Purple). The breadth of authors featured in the book shows the significant impact of Hughes’s work and the Harlem Renaissance more broadly.