Carter G. Hughes helped Woodson catalog new and noteworthy experiences and achievements of African Americans. These achievements were celebrated in Negro History Week, which Dr. Woodson inaugurated in February between the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. For his own pioneering scholarship, Dr. It coordinates and develops teaching, research and outreach activities in African-American Studies, and the study of race and culture in American society at KU and throughout the Midwest.
This program attracts prominent ethnic minority scholars to the campus in a broad range of disciplines. The Langston Hughes Professor teaches two courses a semester and delivers a campus-wide symposium. Additionally, several past recipients are now tenured faculty members at KU. He continued to write and publish poetry and prose during this time, and in he published his first collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks.
In July he published one of his most celebrated poems, "Let America Be America Again" in Esquire, which examined the unrealized hopes and dreams of the country's lower class and disadvantaged, expressing a sense of hope that the American Dream would one day arrive.
In , he served as a war correspondent for several American newspapers during the Spanish Civil War. Also around this time, Hughes began contributing a column to the Chicago Defender , for which he created a comic character named Jesse B. Semple, better known as "Simple," a Black Everyman that Hughes used to further explore urban, working-class Black themes, and to address racial issues. The columns were highly successful, and "Simple" would later be the focus of several of Hughes' books and plays.
In the late s, Hughes contributed the lyrics for a Broadway musical titled Street Scene , which featured music by Kurt Weill. The success of the musical would earn Hughes enough money that he was finally able to buy a house in Harlem. Around this time, he also taught creative writing at Atlanta University today Clark Atlanta University and was a guest lecturer at a university in Chicago for several months. Over the next two decades, Hughes would continue his prolific output.
In he wrote a play that inspired the opera Troubled Island and published yet another anthology of work, The Poetry of the Negro. In Hughes published one of his most celebrated poems, "Harlem What happens to a dream deferred? What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore — And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over— Like a syrupy sweet? Literary scholars have debated Hughes' sexuality for years, with many claiming the writer was gay and included a number of coded references to male lovers in his poems as did Walt Whitman, a major influence on Hughes.
Hughes never married, nor was he romantically linked to any of the women in his life. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes and his contemporaries had different goals and aspirations than the black middle class. They criticized the men known as the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance: W. Du Bois, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Alain LeRoy Locke, as being overly accommodating and assimilating eurocentric values and culture to achieve social equality.
They criticized the divisions and prejudices based on skin color within the black community. The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad.
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