Langston
Hughes:
Aggressively
Nonviolent
Langston Hughes used aggressive language and leftist political affiliation
to rally African-Americans, and later the entire working class affected
by
the Depression, to demand their rights. The nature of the language that
Langston Hughes employs in his revolutionary poetry and plays is
aggressive, but not encouraging of violence. Langston Hughes’s
revolutionary writing period and his treatment of Communism support the
following definition of nonviolence as stated by William Lloyd Garrison:
“Nonviolence is a state of activity, ever fighting the good fight, ever
foremost to assail unjust power… in a world-wide spirit. It is passive
only
in this sense—that it will not return evil for evil.” (True, xv)
The aggression present in the works of Langston Hughes can be
attributed to much more than violent response. According to popular
analysis, the Civil Rights Movement did not officially begin until Rosa
Parks
refused to give up her seat to a white individual on a bus in 1955. (True,
89) Despite the extremely revolutionary nature of the work of Hughes and
other Harlem Renaissance artists and writers, the movement (in the eyes
of historians) did not exist until the frequently taught Rosa Parks incident.
While Rosa Parks’ action is considered civilly disobedient in the most
heroic form of such, she was the first to take recognized action. Rosa
Parks demonstrated that one could take aggressive action without being
violent. Hughes did this in his writing before Rosa Parks’ incident on
the
bus. Furthermore, violence asserts an amount of harm or damage actively
committed against another person, group, or object. Nonviolence is
associated with a political objective. (American Heritage Dictionary)
In analyzing the nonviolent nature of Hughes’s writing, we must look at
the elements of culture and revolution that Hughes uses in his writing,
and the doctrines to which he subscribed. The four main cultural
influences that Hughes used to develop his writing were African-American
cultural elements, The Black Arts Movement, nationalism, and Communism.
The central aspect of Hughes’s perspective as a writer and as a human
being is his blackness. During the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes helped
develop African-American identity by reaching into the existing identity.
“He began the necessary reconciliation of formal black poets to their folk
roots and grass roots audience… he went far enough to be called at
different times and by different people subversive, prurient, shallow,
simplistic, racist, terms which might well apply to oral folk culture when
viewed from a literate, formal perspective. Hughes wanted to be as
honest as the blues.” (Ostendorf, 122)
This folk tradition was essential to Hughes’s voice as an African-American
writer, and later as a revolutionary leftist poet. Another cultural
characteristic that may have helped shape Hughes’s voice is
one-upmanship, or “dozens.” Usually used as a game, dozens are included
in the work of some African-American poets, such as Imamu Amiri Baraka
(LeRoi Jones). (Ostendorf, 156)
Hughes was a part of the Black Arts Movement, and this also affected his
writing. The Black Arts Movement supported the views that Hughes was
developing. The Black Arts Movement encompassed third world culture. It
sought to destroy white mindset, habit, and cultural objects. The Black
Arts Movement also aimed to rethink basic philosophical questions from
the new African-American perspective, and was against anything that
separates and artist from his or her community. In short, “Black Art…
envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black
America.” (Neal, 122)
The purpose of the movement was to reevaluate Western aesthetics, how
a writer functions in society, and how art affects society. The concept
grew (culturally) nationalistic, and complemented the Communist platform
that Hughes promoted. In post-Hughes civil rights, so well tied was
(cultural) nationalism to the Black Arts Movement, that it merged with
the
Black Power movement in 1968. (Neal, 122) Here, Hughes depicts the
essence of the Black Arts Movement:
We 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. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful.
And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t
matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know
how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. (p. 48,
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, 1926, Neal, 123)
The nationalist views expressed by Hughes and the general intentions of
the Black Arts Movement were of one nationalist school that arose after
World War I: Black Nationalism. (Dawahare, 1) Nationalism, usually
intended to unite people, further divided America racially. Therefore,
Anglo-Nationalism was the other type of nationalism that arose. Some
Black Nationalists, such as Garvey, asserted pan-Africanism and the back
to Africa movement.
Communism greatly influenced Hughes and his views on violence. As a
political belief system, Communism does not include or support violence.
Communism was very appealing toward African-Americans because of the
way Stalin defined a nation: “A nation is a historically developed
community of people with a common language, territory, economic life,
and historical traditions reflecting itself in a common culture.”
Hughes and other Harlem Renaissance figures easily applied this definition
to African-American culture, and later to the entire working class. Hughes
saw the Communist Party of the United States as engaging because he
viewed their platform as democratic and against racism. (Dawahare, 5)
While civil rights had not yet begun to reach their maturity, the
foundation of leadership set by the Communist Party began in 1932. Being
held back from fair pay and other equal rights, African-Americans were
now troubled further by the Great Depression. (White, 50) The Communist
Party drew African-Americans by offering unity and support while
respecting the efforts of individual African-Americans such as Langston
Hughes. (In this respect, the black church community worked similarly).
Hughes applied the elements of African-American culture, the Black Arts
Movement, nationalism, and Communism to more specific views, using
them in his writing without condoning violence.
Coming from an oppressed perspective, Langston Hughes was able to
support Communism nonviolently while vehemently opposing fascism.
Hughes saw fascism as a force which greatly opposed fundamental
communist beliefs. In July of 1937, Hughes presented a militant but
anti-fascist speech to the Second International Writers Congress in Paris.
“The fascists of the world use [racist slogans] as a bugaboo and a terror
to keep the working masses from getting together.” (Shapiro, 287) Here,
Hughes accuses fascists of preventing integration so that a working class
communist revolution could be possible. During this time, Hughes
“poignantly expressed his bitterness at being confronted with the twin
evils of fascism abroad and racism at home.” (Shapiro, 340) This made it
extraordinarily difficult for Hughes to promote his political ideals. Hughes
describes this pressure in Beaumont to Detroit, published in Common
Ground in 1943:
Looky here, America
What you done done—
Let things drift
Until the riots come
Now your policemen
Let the mobs run free.
I reckon you don’t care
Nothing about me.
You tell me that hitler
Is a mighty bad man.
I guess he took lessons
From the klu klux klan.
You tell me mussolini’s
Got an evil heart.
Well, it mus-a been in Beaumont
That he had his start—
Cause everything that hitler
And mussolini do
Negroes get the same
Treatment from you
You jim crowed me
Before hitler rose to power—
And you’re still jim crowing me
Right now, this very hour.
Yet you say we’re fightin
For democracy.
Then why don’t democracy
Include me?
I ask you this question
Cause I want to know
How long I got to fight
BOTH HITLER—AND JIM CROW.
(Hughes, from Shapiro, 340)
The mobs and riots that Hughes refers to in the first and second stanzas
do not refer to the violent race riots that followed in Harlem from
1964-1969- Hughes wrote this poem long before they occurred. (Farber,
128) The riots and mobs refer instead to white violence and lynching
mobs.
In stanzas three and four, Hughes expresses nonviolent, aggressive anger
toward the hypocrisy of white America. He accuses America of
condemning Hitler, while at the same time allowing the Klu Klux Klan
lynching mobs to run free. Hughes then applies the scenario to Mussolini’s
fascism and Beaumont. White Americans, he’s asserting, will fight to the
death to protect democracy abroad, but not domestically.
In stanza five, Hughes clearly defines his argument: the monstrous
ideologies that allow others to threaten democracy are the same or similar
to those being used against African-Americans.
Hughes asks why he is not included in democracy in stanza seven. If
America were truly fighting for democracy, he asserts, it would include
him. This pressure is further justified by Hughes’s frustration at having
to
fight fascism abroad and domestically.
Hughes also expresses this feeling in Peace:
“In the dark/ They could not see/ Who had gained/ The victory.”
(Hughes, 56) Here, Hughes is referring to the dead in their graves. Hughes
also refers to the double pressure of American hypocrisy and fascism
elsewhere. The dead are ‘in the dark,’ or obscured, but it could also refer
to their skin color. If oppressed from both angles, as Langston Hughes
feels, is it possible to find a victor? Fascism and America as it was may
have been equally disheartening and oppressive toward the
African-American community.
Now knowing Hughes’s true definitions of what communism does and does
not include, and how he applied it to Beaumont to Detroit, one can
observe a much clearer and propagandic way in which Hughes expressed
his communist beliefs: his plays. Nowhere is Hughes more straightforward
and expressive of his communist ideas than in his play, Scottsboro,
Limited.
Scottsboro, Limited “calls for a recognition of a corrupt justice system
that can be eradicated only by an active audience response. The play
ends in typical agit-prop [didactic agitation propaganda] style with the
audience rising en masse shouting, ‘Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!’” (Duffy,
7)
This play also helped found and define theater in which the audience
participates for a strictly political cause. (Van den Berg)
In the play, Red Voices (white communist workers) and 8 Black Boys work
together, pledging to fight together. While blatantly communist, the play
seeks to integrate all of the oppressed people in the play to fight against
their oppression by means of using unity in communism. The play is based
upon the incident in Scottsboro, Alabama, in which black men were falsely
accused, tried, and killed for raping a white woman.
While the continual call for fighting is prevalent throughout the end of
the
play, Hughes is not necessarily encouraging violence.
He is definitely using the agit-prop form to move the audience into action,
and Hughes frequently admitted writing propaganda. Hughes has written
the audience into “fighting the good fight” that William Lloyd Garrison
described when defining nonviolence.
In the same spirit, theaters in New York that were associated with black
drama and/or Langston Hughes were proudly decorating their stages with
banners that read “Theater Is a Weapon.” (Duffy, 7) While this statement
certainly sounds aggressive, the actions of the theaters operated within
Garrison’s definition of nonviolence.
In Scottsboro, Limited, Hughes promotes integration among the working
classes for a unified goal. This also proves nonviolence, because the
blacks and Red Voices (whites) are not confronting each other, but are
serving as working class or enslaved people on a noble quest for freedom
through communism. The purpose of the play was not only to involve the
audience in shouting propaganda, but to shock the audience into realizing
the suffering of the working class and of African-Americans characters,
and how the sufferers had a great deal in common, and a cause to unify.
This is Hughes’s purpose.
In the play, there is a “general call for the audience to recognize that
strength in numbers comes through solidarity, whether it is ethnic
solidarity or the solidarity of labor. [Agit-pop plays] were often bellicose
and reactionary and used the productions as a means to shock and
affront their audience… the audience is manipulated to respond to the
event both physically and emotionally.” (Duffy, 26) The Communist Party
found this type of propaganda so successful that they created New York
based companies that performed only agit-prop plays.
By 1932, Hughes began incorporating class into his writing of struggles,
not exclusively race. In 1935, Hughes wrote Air Raid Over Harlem: “Black
and white workers united as one… THE BLACK AND WHITE
WORKERS--/you and me.” (Dawahare, 7) Here, Hughes asserts his
aggression with capital letters, but in this instance, it is more one of
power between combined black and white forces within the context of
communism. “Hughes’s internationalist poetry aims dialectically to
preserve and transcend the categories of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ in order to
overcome the fragmentation of global working class struggles.”
(Dawahare, 1)
In Hughes’s poem War, Hughes encourages all working class heroes,
regardless of race, to unite.
WAR
The face of war is my face.
The face of war is your face.
What color
Is the face
Of war?
Brown, black, white—
Your face and my face.
Death is the broom
I take in my hands
To sweep the world
Clean.
I sweep and I sweep
Then mop and I mop.
I dip my broom in blood,
My mop in blood—
And blame you for this,
Because you are there,
Enemy.
It’s hard to blame me,
Because I am here—
So I kill you.
And you kill me.
My name,
Like your name,
Is war.
(Hughes, 59)
In this poem, Hughes clearly speaks to the masses. Hughes even mentions
different races, and then evokes the image of the custodian, and how the
power lies in his hands. This shows that Hughes was applying the same
concept to poetry as he was to his play writing.
While Hughes was able to clearly express his messages iny declared
propaganda, problems were erupting as Nazi Germany and the USSR
signed an anti-aggression pact. Hughes and other leftists were angry,
because they desired to see an alliance between the United States and
the USSR. Desperately, Hughes begged the American liberals to help the
USSR see their own foolishness, but eventually Hughes’s favor of the
USSR faded along with that of other leftists (particularly notably
nonviolent ones) as the USSR barbarically invaded Finland. In addition
to
the confusion caused by this, Hughes couldn’t support himself anymore by
writing radicalism, and he was putting himself in danger were he to
continue doing so. (Rampersad, 374)
Hughes and other leftists saw the USSR’s actions as violently aggressive
and extremely oppressive—very hypocritical. In this sense, it is clear
that
Hughes saw the Russian invasion of Finland as violent and oppressive.
Having already negatively linked violence and oppression in his own
culture, it is again likely that Hughes would not support an oppressive
invasion and that he would not support violence.
Annotated Bibliography
Tara DellaFranzia
Works Cited
Dawahare, Anthony. “Langston Hughes’s Radical Poetry and the “End of
Race”.” Melus 23 (1998): 21-42
Duffy, Susan. The Political Plays of Langston Hughes. USA: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2000.
Ervin, Hazel, ed. African American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000. New
York: Twayne Publishers, 1999.
Henderson Jr., Lenneal J. Black Political Life in the United States. USA:
Chandler Publishing Company, 1972.
Hughes, Langston. The Panther & The Lash. New York: Vintage Publishing
Company, 1992.
Ostendorf, Berndt. Black Literature in White America. New Jersey: Barnes
& Noble Books, 1982.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume I: 1902-1941.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Shapiro, Herbert. White Violence and Black Response: From
Reconstruction to Montgomery. USA: University of Massachusetts Press,
1988.
True, Michael. An Energy Field More Intense Than War: The Nonviolent
Tradition and American Literature. New York: Syracuse University Press,
1995.
White, John. Black Leadership in America: from Booker T Washington to
Jesse Jackson. New York: Longman Group Limited, 1985.
Writing Main
All writing is copyright its
author, 2002.
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