[ Poet Langston Hughes was invited to speak at Occidental College
on this day in 1948, then uninvited when red-baiters released a report
calling him a “subversive.” His story shows how the postwar Red
Scare targeted radicals, particularly black leftists.]
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THE RED SCARE TOOK AIM AT BLACK RADICALS LIKE LANGSTON HUGHES  
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Peter Dreier
March 31, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Poet Langston Hughes was invited to speak at Occidental College on
this day in 1948, then uninvited when red-baiters released a report
calling him a “subversive.” His story shows how the postwar Red
Scare targeted radicals, particularly black leftists. _

Poet, author, playwright and radical activist Langston Hughes in New
York, February 1959., Underwood Archives / Getty Images

 

In the fall of 1947, the Eagle Rock Council for Civic Unity scheduled
a talk by Langston Hughes to be held at Occidental College’s
eight-hundred-seat Thorne Hall on March 31, 1948. But days before
Hughes was scheduled to arrive on campus, the Los Angeles college’s
board of trustees hastily called a meeting and canceled his talk.

Hughes was one of America’s most well-known black writers, with many
volumes of poetry, short stories, magazine articles, radio scripts, a
Broadway play, a Broadway musical, a Hollywood screenplay, song
lyrics, and a popular newspaper column under his belt. But this was
the dawn of McCarthyism, and when the trustees looked at Hughes, all
they saw was a Red.

The incident illustrates how the insidious post–World War II Red
Scare worked. In a period of escalating tensions between the United
States and the Soviet Union, conservative politicians, newspapers, and
others sought to frighten people into thinking that Communists were
brainwashing Americans and subverting our democracy by infiltrating
key institutions — chiefly labor unions, Hollywood and television,
universities, and the media. They orchestrated investigations and
hearings to identify so-called left-wing agitators. If those
identified refused to comply — that is, to say that they were
Communists and to inform on their radical friends — they would
likely lose their livelihoods. Hollywood producers, TV and radio
stations, record companies, colleges, local boards of education, book
publishers, and concert halls fired or refused to hire those whose
names appeared on notorious lists of so-called “subversives.”

The goal was not simply to root out Communists, but to scare Americans
against criticizing American racism, foreign policy, and violations of
workers’ rights, among other concerns. The Red Scare sought not only
to stifle the _right_ to dissent but also the _will_ to dissent by
making certain critiques taboo. For example, in the 1949 film _The
Red Menace_, Communists are depicted protesting at a real estate
office — a not-so-subtle message that anyone who advocated for
housing for veterans or black Americans, common activist issues at the
time, must be a Communist.

The red-baiters particularly targeted civil rights and union
activists, high school teachers, college faculty, writers, and
performers by canceling their talks, books, performances, and even
their passports. Race played an enormous role in the Red Scare.
Prominent black figures who were investigated and blacklisted included
Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlotta Bass, Canada Lee, Dorothy
Dandridge, Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Richard Wright, Hazel Scott,
Harry Belafonte, Ferdinand Smith, Alphaeus Hunton, Langston Hughes,
and many others. In July 1949, the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) even held three days of hearings on “Communist
Infiltration of Minority Groups.” As late as the 1960s, the FBI and
right-wing groups were going after alleged Communists in the civil
rights movement, including several close aides to Martin Luther King
Jr.

The Hughes event in 1948, put on by the Eagle Rock Council, was
intended to be a fundraiser to help pay the college costs for a local
black female high schooler who wanted to attend Occidental (nicknamed
“Oxy”), which had just admitted its first black student that year.
The council had started after World War II, initially to help
displaced Japanese-Americans return to their homes in greater Los
Angeles and to challenge the image of Eagle Rock — the neighborhood
where Occidental was located — as an “all-white enclave.” The
council was one of several Los Angeles–based groups involved in a
campaign to outlaw racial discrimination in housing at a time when
doing so was highly controversial. It was affiliated with the American
Council for Race Relations, a liberal but hardly left-wing group that
sought to promote religious and racial tolerance.

The Hughes event at Occidental was set to go off without a hitch. But
little did the organizers know that in the weeks leading up to the
scheduled talk, State Senator Jack Tenney, chair of the
legislature’s Fact-Finding Committee on UnAmerican Activities, was
completing an investigation into alleged subversives in California.

One week before the event, Tenney’s committee issued a report
describing Hughes as a Communist. Occidental officials were alarmed.
They denied that Tenney had brought pressure to bear on the college,
but president of the college, Arthur G. Coons, told the _Los Angeles
Times_ that, “At this particular time, it is considered unwise to
present anyone at a public meeting on the campus whose views are apt
to be socially and politically divisive.” Franklin P. Rush,
president of the college’s board of trustees, who was also the vice
president and general manager of the Southern California Telephone
Company, said that Hughes’s views were “not particularly loyal —
at least not in line with Occidental’s policy as a Christian
college.”

The goal was not simply to root out Communists, but to scare Americans
against criticizing American racism, foreign policy, and violations of
workers’ rights.

The red-baiters’ goal was not merely to kill the careers of
individual radicals, but to send a message through the media to the
rest of the country. In this instance, Tenney got the headlines he was
hoping for. The _Los Angeles Times_ story was headlined “Tenney
Protests Poet’s Billing As Oxy Cancels Date.” The _Sacramento
Bee_ ran with “Slated Appearance of Negro, Reported Red, Is
Opposed.” “Occidental Calls Off Poet’s Talk” blared the _Los
Angeles Daily News_. A few days later, the American Civil Liberties
Union protested Occidental’s action, but that news was ignored by
most newspapers. One exception was the _California Eagle_, a
progressive black-oriented paper based in Los Angeles, whose story
warned of “growing American fascism.”

Like many colleges Occidental, which was founded in 1887, had a long
history of excluding black students. A 1939 editorial in the student
newspaper the _Occidental_ titled “A Race Problem at Oxy”
pointed out that the college had not admitted one black student since
its founding. Two years earlier, the editorial noted, a black student
had been discouraged from applying because of fears no one would room
with him and that “his social life would be unhappily circumscribed.
. . . That such a thing can happen is an admission that Oxy has
something of a race problem.”

In April 1947, James Dombrowski, a Methodist minister and executive
director of the progressive civil rights organization the Southern
Conference Educational Fund, spoke on campus. According to a story in
the student newspaper, some students told him that the college had
resisted admitting black students and that the college’s
fraternities and sororities were particularly opposed to the idea.

The following fall — four months after Jackie Robinson broke
baseball’s color barrier — Oxy admitted its first black student,
George Ellison, the son of a Presbyterian minister from Philadelphia.
But it was one thing to have a black student on campus. Inviting a
black radical to speak to the student body and the wider community
was, for some, a bridge too far.

“Red Devil in Black”

Since the 1920s, Hughes, an important figure in the Harlem
Renaissance, had been one of the most prominent black writers in
America. He published his first volume of poetry, _The Weary
Blues, _in 1926_, _and for the next two decades published a steady
stream of novels, plays, operas, essays, memoirs, poems, and a
syndicated newspaper column, making him a sought-after public speaker.

His 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,”
published in the_ Nation _magazine when Hughes was only twenty-four,
became a manifesto for him and other writers and activists who
asserted racial pride. He wrote:

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. 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.

Upon graduation from Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University in 1929,
Hughes returned to New York and resumed his prolific career. His first
novel _Not Without Laughter_, published in 1930, won the Harmon Gold
Medal for Literature. Its central character is an African American
boy, Sandy, caught between two worlds. Sandy’s father is footloose
and fun loving, while his mother works hard, demands respect, and
appreciates the middle-class values of the white community around her.
Through Sandy’s eyes, Hughes reveals the conflicting values and
attitudes within the black community, portraying the lives of the
characters in intimate detail.

Soon came _Mule Bone_, a 1931 play coauthored with Zora Neale
Hurston, _Popo and Fifina_, a 1932 children’s book, and _The Dream
Keeper_, a 1932 collection of poems. In 1934, Hughes published a
collection of short stories, _The Ways of White Folks_, about the
humorous but ultimately tragic relationships between blacks and
whites.

In his art Hughes portrayed the everyday lives of ordinary black
people, including their joys, sorrows, music, humor, and routine
encounters with racism. But unlike other prominent black poets of that
era, such as Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, Hughes
sought to tell the stories of blacks in their own vernacular. This
offended some middle-class black Americans who were embarrassed by
Hughes’s depictions.

Like many Americans, Hughes was radicalized during the Depression, as
he saw his family, friends, Harlem, and the country suffer. He
developed close ties to the Communist Party (CP) and its orbit of
people and organizations. The CP made a priority of organizing and
recruiting black Americans and challenging racial segregation and
discrimination in jobs, the military, housing, and the criminal
justice system, including the persistence of lynching. For example, it
raised money for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black
teenage boys unfairly accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. It also
sponsored protests and generally publicized the case, which became a
national news story.

The red-baiters’ goal was not merely to kill the careers of
individual radicals, but to send a message through the media to the
rest of the country.

That year, Hughes wrote “Christ in Alabama,” a poem expressing his
outrage at the racial injustice, ideas that he repeated during his
speaking tour at black colleges and churches. Three years later, in an
article for the_ Crisis_, the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) magazine, Hughes published
“Cowards from the Colleges,” criticizing the silence of black
college and community leaders over the Scottsboro case.

In 1932, the Soviet Union invited Hughes and forty other black
Americans to come make a film, _Negro Life_, about American racism.
Although the film was never completed, Hughes was able to travel
throughout the country, which strengthened his increasingly left-wing
views and his criticism of the United States.

In 1935, in his speech to the First American Writers’ Congress, a
CP-sponsored group, Hughes said:

Negro writers can seek to unite blacks and whites in our country, not
on the nebulous basis of an interracial meeting, or the shifting sands
of religious brotherhood, but on the solid ground of the daily working
class struggle to wipe out, now and forever, all the old inequalities
of the past.

In 1937, Hughes covered the Spanish Civil War for African American
newspapers. His reporting reflected the American left’s support for
the popular forces resisting a takeover by fascist military strongman
Francisco Franco.

The next year, a CP-sponsored group, the International Workers Order,
published _A New Song
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Hughes’s poems, some of which had already been published in the
CP-sponsored journal _New Masses_. Many of the poems in the book
reflected causes embraced by the Left in general and the Communist
Party in particular. In “Chant for Tom Mooney,” Hughes took up the
cause of the radical San Francisco labor leader who had been unfairly
convicted of a 1916 bombing that killed ten people and whom the CP
persistently advocated should be released from prison. Other poems in
the collection, including “Chant for May Day,” “Justice,”
“Lynching Song,” “Open Letter to the South,” “Song of
Spain,” “Negro Ghetto,” “Ballad of Ozzie Powell” (one of the
Scottsboro Boys), and “Union,” reflected Hughes’s growing
radical consciousness.

“I speak in the name of the black millions,” Hughes wrote in the
title poem, “Awakening to Action.” But he viewed their struggle
not only as a battle against racism, but also as part of a crusade for
economic justice and equality, writing, _“_Revolt! Arise! The Black
And White World Shall be one! The Worker’s World!_” _

_ _In “Let America Be America Again,” originally published
in _Esquire _and included in the collection, Hughes contrasts the
nation’s promise with its mistreatment of his fellow African
Americans, the poor, Native Americans, workers, farmers, and
immigrants. He hoped to see a day when America would no longer be
divided by class and race divisions:

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

Not surprisingly, Hughes was no stranger to controversy. For example,
when he arrived at the Vista del Arroyo Hotel in Pasadena in November
1940 to discuss his new autobiography, _The Big Sea_, he was greeted
by a large crowd carrying picket signs and a sound truck that played
“God Bless America” adorned with a “100 percent American”
banner. They were followers of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who
had denounced Hughes from her Angelus Temple pulpit as a “radical
and anti-Christ,” and as a “red devil in black,” citing his 1932
poem, “Goodbye Christ
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protest forced the hotel manager to cancel the event.

Hughes kept up his prolific writing pace throughout the 1940s, much of
it tinged with left-wing ideas about racism and workers’ rights.
Though he lived in New York, he had many artistic and political ties
in the Los Angeles area and frequently visited his local friends
during his West Coast speaking tours.

 

After he returned from his visit to the Soviet Union, he encouraged
his friend Frances E. Williams, a black actress, to study theater in
that country. She followed his advice and, once back in the United
States, had a successful career as an actress and director. In 1941,
Williams moved to Los Angeles, where she quickly became an activist in
left-wing circles, befriending Charlotta Bass
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of the _California Eagle_
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black newspaper. Williams organized events, including plays, art
exhibits, and other cultural exhibitions, and her home became a
meeting place for leftist activists. In 1948, Williams became the
first black woman to run for the California State Assembly
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Progressive Party ticket. She was a leader of the new Screen Actors
Guild union, Actors’ Equity Association, and the National Negro
Labor Council.

In 1932, the Soviet Union invited Hughes and forty other black
Americans to come make a film, Negro Life, about American racism.

It is likely that Williams helped organize Hughes’s speaking gigs in
Los Angeles, which included his planned talk at Occidental in March
1948. Any California politician trying to identify so-called radical
“subversives” wouldn’t have to dig deep to turn up Williams,
Bass, and their well-known friend Hughes.

“Negro Leaders in the Communist Field”

Throughout most of the 1930s, State Senator Tenney had been a leader
in the musicians’ union and a New Dealer. In 1936, he was elected to
the California State Assembly as a Democrat. But he soon moved to the
right, and in 1940, he was elected to the state senate as a
Republican, serving for twelve more years. During his time in the
state senate, he became the state’s most high-profile
anti-Communist, elevating his visibility by crusading against radicals
within California’s labor unions, universities, public schools,
Hollywood, and other sectors. “You can no more coexist with
communism than you can coexist with a nest of rattlesnakes,” Tenney
proclaimed.

In 1940, Tenney cosponsored a bill to remove from the California
ballot any political party with the word “Communist” in its title
or that had any ties to the Communist Party. The bill passed and was
reluctantly signed into law by Governor Culbert Olson. In 1941, he
became chair of the newly formed Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American
Activities. This became his vehicle to gain public attention by
investigating and attacking so-called “subversives.”

Tenney was in cahoots with California business leaders, who were
worried about the public’s support for labor unions, regulations,
higher taxes on the rich, and the expansion of government social
programs, including subsidized housing and health care. In 1941, soon
after Walt Disney paid for an ad in _Variety_ that blamed Communists
for instigating a strike of his cartoonists_,_ Tenney used his
committee to launch a probe into “Reds in movies.” He didn’t
find any, but he grabbed lots of headlines.

Throughout the 1940s, during hearings and when talking to the press,
Tenney used phrases like “Communist front” and “fellow
traveler” indiscriminately to stigmatize people involved in social
causes and to paint as wholly Communist any liberal organization that
had members with alleged ties to the CP. Tenney knew that he could
generate more headlines by focusing on well-known public figures, so
it should not be surprising that while his committee began a series of
investigations of hundreds of alleged Communists, it included such
well-known people as Robeson, writer-activist Carey McWilliams,
housing advocate Catherine Bauer Wurster, labor organizer Luisa
Moreno, actor Edward G. Robinson, and of course Hughes. By 1947,
Congress was conducting its own investigation into Communists in
Hollywood and other industries. Those and later hearings attracted
media attention for politicians on the Senate and House witch-hunting
committees.

In the years after World War II, Hughes was still a popular figure,
giving talks at colleges, churches, community groups, libraries,
literary clubs, and other venues. His speeches always included
powerful denunciations of American racism. But by the middle of 1947,
as the Red Scare escalated, Hughes had started to come under attack by
veterans’ groups and conservative radio commentators and columnists.

‘You can no more coexist with communism than you can coexist with a
nest of rattlesnakes,’ Tenney proclaimed.

In a common tactic, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover began leaking
information about Hughes’s left-wing ties and his criticisms of
organized religion to the press and to groups that had invited him to
speak, many of which began to cancel his talks. In early March 1948,
for example, the exclusive North Shore Country Day School outside
Chicago canceled Hughes’s talk after the _Chicago Tribune_ ran a
front-page story titled “Red-Tinged Poet to Speak at Winnetka
Private School.”

Foreshadowing the censorship efforts of Sen. Joe McCarthy — and
indeed those of current Florida governor Ron DeSantis — in early
1947, Tenney began an investigation into so-called “subversive”
textbooks used in California’s public schools. By subversive, Tenney
and his anti-Communist allies meant books that dealt with issues such
as slum housing, unfair labor practices, and racial and religious
discrimination. This is the effort that first brought Hughes to
Tenney’s attention, as Hughes’s stories and poems were taught in
some California classrooms. Tenney sponsored a bill to forbid
California’s public schools from teaching “un-American” subjects
and require them to teach “Americanism” as part of the curriculum.

Tenney’s committee officially released its 448-page report
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“Communist Front Organizations” on March 24, 1948. The report
mentioned Hughes forty-six times, identifying a number of
organizations that he was allegedly affiliated with — some true and
others false. The report noted that “Hughes may be said to rate with
Paul Robeson as notorious Negro leaders in the Communist field.”

The report mentioned that Hughes was scheduled to speak at Occidental
the following week. A few days before the report’s official release,
on March 21, the Occidental board of trustees had canceled Hughes’s
talk, having no doubt been contacted by Tenney himself. The document
trumpeted the about-face, saying, “As this report goes to press, a
spokesman for Occidental College announces that the institution has
canceled Hughes’s appearance.” The Tenney report also attacked the
Eagle Rock Council for Civic Unity, the group that had invited Hughes
to speak at Occidental. The report noted that Jerome W. McNair, the
council’s program director, “is affiliated with a number of
Communist organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union
and the American-Russian Institute.”

The next week, Hughes gave two talks in Los Angeles, one sponsored by
the League of Allied Art and the Unitarian Club, the other by the
Beverly-Fairfax Jewish Community Center. But the following week, his
scheduled talks at public schools in Palo Alto and Vallejo were
canceled in response to veterans and church groups concerned about his
“possible Communistic connections.”

The Hughes incident at Occidental was only one small part of
Tenney’s vigorous anti-Communist crusade. In 1949, Tenney drafted
legislation to put a constitutional amendment on the state ballot that
would give the legislature the authority to prohibit the University of
California from hiring “disloyal” faculty. Fearful of Tenney’s
power, in 1950, the university’s board of regents agreed to
institute a “loyalty oath” for all faculty. Of the sixty-nine
professors fired nationwide for political reasons during the Red
Scare, almost half were from the University of California, most of
them on the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses, for refusing to sign
the loyalty oath.

By subversive, Tenney and his anti-Communist allies meant books that
dealt with issues such as slum housing, unfair labor practices, and
racial and religious discrimination.

But Tenney’s 1948 report, loyalty oath, and “Americanism” in
schools campaigns were his last hurrah. In 1949, his state senate
colleagues removed him as chair of the Un-American Activities
Committee, in part for violating due process and in part because of
the hundreds of people brought before his committee over eight years
as so-called subversives, not one had been indicted, much less
convicted. Tenney had done much to bring about the Red Scare, which
would only intensify in the coming decade, but he’d done so at the
cost of his personal ambitions. (The same eventually happened to
Senator McCarthy, who was censured by his US Senate colleagues in 1954
for his recklessness, which soon destroyed his political career.)

In 1949, Tenney finished fourth in his campaign for Los Angeles mayor.
In 1952, he lost his campaign for the US House of Representatives as
well as his bizarre run for vice president of the United States on the
right-wing Christian Nationalist Party. Two years later, he was
defeated in the Republican primary for his own state senate seat.
During the 1950s, he published several conspiratorial antisemitic
books including _Anti-Gentile Activity in America_, _Zion’s Fifth
Column, Zionist Network, _and _Zion’s Trojan Horse. _He wound up
serving as part-time city attorney in Cabazon, a small town in the
California desert. He died in 1970 at age seventy.

Blocking the Red Channels

Despite Tenney’s political demise, his tactics inspired other
politicians like McCarthy and Richard Nixon, who made names for
themselves as anti-Communist Red-hunters as the Cold War intensified.
In 1950, a group of former FBI agents, with help from the FBI and
Congress’s House Committee on Un-American Activities, issued
a report
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“Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and
Television.”

It listed 151 actors, writers, musicians, broadcast journalists, and
others whom it claimed, often with dubious evidence at best, were part
of the Communist influence in the entertainment industry — including
actors Edward G. Robinson, Lee J. Cobb, Avon Long, and Orson Welles,
writers Arthur Miller and Dashiell Hammett, and musical artists
Leonard Bernstein, Pete Seeger, Josh White, Lena Horne, Aaron Copland,
and Hughes. Many of of those listed in “Red Channels” were issued
subpoenas to testify before Congress and blacklisted for refusing to
cooperative with Congress’s witch-hunt.

In its section on Hughes, the “Red Channels” report identified
more than forty so-called subversive left-wing organizations and
publications that Hughes had allegedly been affiliated with. These
included the American Peace Mobilization, Friends of the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade, American Labor Party, International Labor Defense,
Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, League of American Writers,
American Youth for Democracy, National Negro Congress, New Theatre
League, National Council of Soviet-American Friendship, People’s
Songs, the _New Masses_, and the _Daily Worker_.

In 1953, McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
called Hughes to testify. Rather than defy the politicians, he chose
to cooperate. He refused to name names, but he repudiated his past
radical ideas. Under questioning from McCarthy and his top lawyer Roy
Cohn (who would later be Donald Trump’s lawyer), Hughes denied he
had ever been a Communist Party member. He admitted that he once
admired the Soviet Union, but said that he had become disillusioned
years earlier. He claimed that his poem “Goodbye Christ” had been
misunderstood and that he was neither an atheist nor anti-religious.
He maintained that be believed in democracy and racial equality, and
seemed to be criticizing McCarthyism itself, when he told the
committee:

I would like to see an America where people of any race, color, or
creed may live on a plane of cultural and material well-being,
cooperating together unhindered by sectarian, radical, or factional
prejudices and harmful intolerances that do nobody any good, an
America proud of its tradition, capable of facing the future without
the necessary pitting of people against people and without the disease
of personal distrust and suspicion of one’s neighbor.

Hughes’s cooperation with McCarthy’s committee cost him his
friendships with Robeson, Du Bois, and others who had defied the
witch-hunters. Hughes severed his ties with several left-wing groups,
including the American Labor Party and the National Council of
American-Soviet Friendship, which the FBI, the Department of Justice,
and Congressional Red-hunters viewed as Communist-led organizations.
In 1959, when he published _Selected Poems_, he left out some of his
more radical poems.

Whether Hughes sincerely rejected his radical past or simply
accommodated himself to the realities of being a black writer trying
to make a living in Cold War America is unknown. Although he publicly
abandoned many of his left-wing views, he continued to protest the
social and racial conditions endured by African Americans and to
promote black culture in his many works. He also continued
to celebrate
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and anti-colonial revolutions in Africa in his poetry. As Billie
Anania has written for _Jacobin, _his later work “continued to
connect racist policing with US-backed dictators in the Third World
and expressed solidarity with liberation movements in Cairo, Cape
Town, and Angola.”

In 1951, when he was still under assault by right-wingers, Hughes
wrote “Dream Deferred.” The poem includes some of most well-known
lines in American literature:

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?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

The poem appeared to be a prediction of the coming civil rights
movement — the sit-ins, voter registration drives, protest marches,
and the urban rebellions of the 1950s and ’60s.

He was already a well-respected writer, but the civil rights movement
and the subsequent explosion of interest in black studies and black
literature boosted his visibility, as his writings became widely read
in high schools and colleges. He was often called the “Poet Laureate
of the Negro Race.”

During his lifetime, Hughes published fifteen volumes of poetry, ten
novels and collections of short stories, twenty plays and operas, two
autobiographies, four books about black history, hundreds of magazine
articles and newspaper columns, and seven books for children,
including books about Africa, the West Indies, jazz, and black
history. He translated into English the works of the Spanish poet
Federico García Lorca and the Latin American Nobel laureate poet
Gabriela Mistral.

Whether Hughes sincerely rejected his radical past or simply
accommodated himself to the realities of being a black writer trying
to make a living in Cold War America is unknown.

Hughes’s racial consciousness and pride, as well as his depictions
of black life, influenced later generations of artists and activists
in Africa and the Caribbean as well as in the United States. During
the 1960s, he inspired and supported many young black writers, helping
shape a new wave of black literature. In his 1967 anthology _The Best
Short Stories by Negro Writers_, Hughes included a short story by a
then unknown Georgia-born writer, Alice Walker, a student at Sarah
Lawrence College. “His support for me meant more than I can say,”
recalled Walker, who has become one of her generation’s most
acclaimed writers.

The playwright Loften Mitchell, a generation younger than Hughes,
said, “Langston set a tone, a standard of brotherhood and friendship
and cooperation, for all of us to follow. You never got from him, ‘I
am the Negro writer,’ but only ‘I am a Negro writer.’ He never
stopped thinking about the rest of us.”

But even after he disavowed Communism, Hughes’s work was still not
immune from controversy. In 1965, the Boston school board fired
twenty-eight-year-old teacher Jonathan Kozol for reading Hughes’s
poem “The Ballad of the Landlord,” which portrays the exploitation
of black tenants by white landlords, to his black fourth-grade
students, going outside the school’s prescribed curriculum. Kozol
described his experiences in the first of his many books, _Death At
An Early Age:_ _The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro
Children in the Boston Public Schools, _which won the 1967 National
Book Award.

The Movement Comes to Oxy

Hughes was never invited back to speak at Occidental. But like other
colleges, Oxy was shaped by the civil rights revolution and
particularly by the 1965 uprising in Watts, a black part of Los
Angeles. By the late 1960s and ’70s, Oxy began to recruit more
black, brown, and low-income students. In 1968, the college hired its
first black faculty member, Mary Jane Hewitt, who offered the first
courses in black literature and culture. Hewitt had a wide network of
local and national black artists, musicians, and actors and was
influential in providing Occidental students, especially the few black
students on campus, with an understanding of black culture and the
contributions of African Americans to American culture.

One of the students who came to Oxy in that period was Roger Guenveur
Smith, who graduated in 1977. Smith recalls walking into one of
Hewitt’s classes one day and finding the professor talking with
writers Maya Angelou and James Baldwin, and actor Roscoe Lee Browne.
In one course with Hewitt, Smith wrote a paper about Hughes. For his
senior project, he created and performed “An Evening with Frederick
Douglass,” the first in a series of biographically and historically
infused plays which have become his signature as an award-winning
actor, playwright, and director. He’s returned to the campus several
times to teach and perform.

In 1979, a black student from Hawaii, then known as Barry Obama,
arrived on campus. Two years later, he gave his first political speech
at an anti-apartheid rally on campus. Rumor has it that he achieved
some success after college. Several years ago, the college inaugurated
a scholarship program named for Obama for students interested in
public service careers.

Among the nation’s top liberal arts colleges, Occidental is now
considered among the most progressive in terms of its curriculum and
commitment to racial and economic diversity — although, like its
counterparts, its students and faculty often complain that it
doesn’t always live up to this promise. Surely there’s much room
for improvement. But today, several Occidental faculty teach courses
that require students to read the writings of Langston Hughes.

PETER DREIER teaches political science at Occidental College. He is
the author or coauthor of seven books.

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