Langston Hughes - or to give him his full name, James Mercer Langston Hughes - shone as brightly as any member of the Harlem Renaissance, which itself was one of the great shining moments of American cultural history. Hughes wrote about ordinary events in the lives of ordinary black Americans, and by paying attention to people who had for so long been considered too unimportant to be the subjects of art (and by describing their lives with such eloquence) he became one of the most important voices in American letters. His subject was more often than not the nature of race relations in the United States, the ways in which race defines nearly every aspect of life for us as Americans. And yet even as he highlighted the ways in which blacks and whites in this country continue to define themselves and the meaning of their own lives in terms of each other, he also helped to define a voice that was distinctly black, that needed no legitimization from the white world.
Hughes's creation of poetic forms that focused on the experiences of black Americans and spoke in an idiom that blacks would recognize as distinct from the traditions of high art as defined by white artists and white audiences was fully intentional. He summarized the importance of and the possibilities of authentically black art forms in 1926 in an article that he wrote for the progressive magazine The Nation:
It is the duty of the younger Negro artist à to change through the force of his art that old whispering "I want to be white," hidden in the aspirations of his people, to "Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!" (Bascom, 1999, p. 87).
Hughes's works - whether poetry or prose - are meant to be read aloud, for his work is fundamentally concerned with rhythm. In many ways it is a literary embodiment of the same metrical concerns that define jazz. This emphasis on cadence both helped to define Hughes's work (as well as that of jazz) as a uniquely b...