How Did Langston Hughes Influence African Americans

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Incessant discrimination against African Americans left them without an amalgamate identity within America. Although artists of African descent had existed before, their works and ideas remained isolated from the broader American populous. The subsequent dichotomy between African American and American culture resonated fervently during the Harlem Renaissance, a breakthrough literary movement during the Roaring Twenties which essentially acted as a prefatory to the integration of African American ideas and arts into the scope of intellectual Americana. Langston Hughes and other black artists produced works that quelled their estrangement in an American culture dominated by Anglo-Saxons, with little before perceived minority contribution. Hughes, …show more content…

His father left in 1903 for Mexico due to racial discrimination and the consequent economic disenfranchisement of blacks in the United States (Howes 204). His mother was unable to find steady work, and refused to join her husband in Mexico. She traveled across many different cities, sometimes accompanied by Langston. However, she most often left him with her mother Mary Langston in Lawrence, Kansas. Mary ran a boarding house for the University of Kanas and allowed whites to room there, but refused to due any labor for them. Hughes’s grandmother was a prideful black woman, and she instilled racial pride in Langston (Henderson). The separation from his mother and father caused Langston to often feel abandoned, so he found himself at an early age turning to books to escape his reality (Rampersad). In his biography, The Big Sea, Langston recalled “even before I was six, books began to happen to me, so that after a while there came a time when I believed in books more than people — which, of course, was wrong.” In high school, Hughes’s poetic skill was already developed and evident, with him being elected class poet and publishing works in the school paper (Howes 204). His early poems reflected influence from Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman, whom he had learned in about school and admired greatly. In his latter teen year, Hughe’s moved to New York an attended Harlem, but dropped out after a year due to discrimination. He discovered the booming cultural plaza of Harlem, where he collaborated with other renowned artists of the Harlem Renaissance for many years and produced some of his most renowned