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Langston Hughes Civil Rights Movement

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Langston Hughes was a man of many talents who was most famous for his head role in the Harlem Renaissance. While talented in many different genres, he was most known for his poetry and his contribution to the style of jazz poetry. While Hughes was not physically present for many demonstrations during the Civil Rights Movement, his poetry and political writing served as an inspiration to people in the United States and around the world.

James Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902 in Missouri. His father, a Black American, unhappy with the way Blacks were treated in America at the time, left the country for Cuba that same year. After his father’s departure, his family started to call him Langston, as James was his father’s name. …show more content…

On his way there he wrote one of his most famous poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” This would be his first published work, and would appear in the magazine Crisis when he was only 19. His father agreed to fund Hughes’ first year at Columbia, but due to difficulties in receiving the funds from his father, challenges with the administration and fellow students because of his race, he left at the end of his first year. However, while he was studying at Columbia, he visited Harlem, New York for the first time. It was the first time in his life that he was surrounded by an entirely Black …show more content…

The Scottsboro case was regarding the alleged rape of two white girls by nine Black teenage boys in Alabama. After the boys were not awarded a fair trial by an impartial jury, the boys were all convicted and sentenced to death. The Communist Party, recognizing the injustice of the situation and using the incident to hopefully gain more Black followers, took an interest in the case and funded one of the best lawyers in the country to appeal the decision. Hughes, witnessing the progress that the Communist Party had made towards equal rights and these boys specifically, sympathized with the radical group. He began writing radical poetry while travelling throughout the South on a book tour. During his tour, he witnessed the severity of the continued social and cultural gaps in the South due to

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