Langston Hughes Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. His father was James Nathaniel and his mother was Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes. His grandfather was Charles Langston, an Ohio abolitionist. As a young boy he lived in Buffalo, New York, Cleveland, Ohio, Lawrence, Kansas, Mexico City, Topeka, Kansas, Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Kansas City, Kansas. In 1914 his parents divorced and he, his mother, and his stepfather moved to Lincoln, Illinois. In high school back in Cleveland, he was elected class poet, and editor of the senior class yearbook. He taught English to some families in Mexico in 1921 and also published his first prose piece, "Mexican Games"(Davis). In an excerpt from an article about Langston Hughes in Encarta 97, it says that he was discovered in 1925, while he was working as a busboy in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., when he accidentally left three of his poems next to the plate of Vachel Lindsay, an American poet. She helped him get publicity for his works and she got him seriously started in writing(Encarta). In an article about Langston Hughes in The Reference Library of Black America it talks about all the places in the world that Hughes has traveled. He probably used much of
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Along these lines Douglass' role is a major one, for relatively few first-hand accounts of slavery as powerful and representative as his exist, in light of the magnitude of the crime, and few voices have been as far-reaching. Years later a group of white and black workers walked in and demanded to be served. Hughes was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance because he was one of the most talented and famous black writers in his time. But Douglass and his gift of language underwent yet another transformation, and his words became a healing balm and a fixer of wrongs. the information of the cultures of other countries to write. Thus, ironically, the torturous beginning of Douglass' existence was inadvertently made (by him) into a treasure for 'us' (being mainly white America). While the identity of his father is uncertain, it is generally accepted that the man was white, giving Douglass a mixed ancestry. " (Norton, 1944) With the duality of perspective came also one of language, a fact to which we owe his writings and abolitionist activism.
In a world where knowledge is sat on by the 'have's, language is power, and language was first Frederick Douglass' first key to freedom, then his armor, and finally his sword. His best drama, "Mulatto," a play, was performed on Broadway 373 times in 1935. Hughes had success in many different fields of writing. From slavery to freedom, from the South to the North, from a young man of many names to the adult named Frederick Douglass, in revealing songs of happiness to be ones of woe, and 'singing' those songs so that all could hear, this gifted man helped America come to terms with slavery as it really was. If it were not for Langston Hughes, African-Americans would not have their current political and social positions today, even though they are not equal to those that white Americans have. He began to use the Blues, Ballad form, dance rhythms, folk speech, and Jazz in his poetry.
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