A Brief Look At Langston Hughes

Before I explain my take on what "identity" means in Langston Hughes works, a man who happened to be one of the most recognizable names in African- American literature, I briefly would like to mention about him to help elucidate his background, and his style of writing.

Langston Hughes was born in the early 1900s, in a deeply segregated place call joplin, Missouri - once a southern confederate state. After moving around many states with his parents (since they couldn't land a job), he decided to to join the military - which gave him the opportunity to travel to West Africa and Europe. After temporary stay in Europe, Hughes joined the black expatriate community. Upon returning to the state, Hughes went back to school to complete his education
and a move to New York to join The Harlem Renaissance, which was a black cultural movement.

In the early part of the 1920’s, after he moved to Harlem along with a growing number of young African American writers, musicians, and artists that formed what is now know as the Harlem Renaissance, his carrier took off. While in New York, Hughes composed a significant body of work, including volumes of poetry, plays, short stories, essays, and novels. The main things that separated Hughes with other writers is used his ability/willingness to reflect his thoughts about political injustices, racial oppression, poverty, the black experience, family, and work. Some say he was fearless and relentless about the, often times, sever content of his work. He did not want to hold the black community to a position above dishonor, and he did not try to appease the white community by blunting the edges of racism's harsh reality. Even though Hughes was criticized by both black and white community about honest depiction of the social status, Hughes' loved his race was not to be questioned - and was proud of his background. I think his admiration for those (African Americans) who lived and worked in spite of adversity led to his style of work.

Going back what "identity" meant for Hughes; he was contributing what he knew, what he witnessed, what he was, how he was treated, and so on.
Based on his life experience, Hughes contributed to the formation of working- class literature. His identity, as a black man in the 1920s, a son of a Negro, made his journey of speaking for the working-class and a theme for much of Hughes’s work easier. After all, that was central to the black experience in America at that time. The racial inequality automatically locked most blacks into a working-class existence. Most were not given the education or the opportunities to pursue more professional careers. Many times, they were barred from even unskilled labor because of their race. As I mentioned above, many blacks in the 1920s, like Hughes’s own family, moved from place to place seeking for employment. Black people worked dead-end jobs, and Hughes valued this lifestyle. He valued the people and experiences involved with it because he felt that it was representative of African Americans - a representative of himself and his ancestors. As workers and as members of the working-class culture, Hughes believed blacks could maintain their individual cultural identity. They would be free to have their own beliefs and customs, independent from the authoritarian way of life they were subjected in that
era.

One his early published poem was called, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers". At the age of 19, Hughes followed the long water- and blood-line of his own line of descents to reflect his identity.

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Words such as “ancient” and “old,” are indicating more than one's single lifetime. Though he wrote the poem while on a train crossing the Mississippi, sites of slave-trading “up and down river,” also reflect an individual's identity... especially for those who carry the wound of slavery in a form of name today, and yesterday. Hughes's southern roots, also include an all too familiar long blood- and birth-right, resisting any attempt to contain it. Hughes combined his multiple cultural identities and ancestries together to explain the social inequality and injustice