There are certain practical things American Negro writers can do through their work.
We can reveal to the Negro masses, from which we come, our potential power to transform the now ugly face of the Southland into a region of peace and plenty.
We can reveal to the white masses those Negro qualities which go beyond the mere ability to laugh and sing and dance and make music, and which are a part of the useful heritage that we place at the disposal of a future free America.
Negro writers can seek to unite blacks and whites in our country, not on the nebulous basis of an inter-racial 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.
Furthermore, by way of exposure, Negro writers can reveal in their novels, stories, poems, and articles:
The lovely grinning face of Philanthropy—which gives a million dollars to a Jim Crow school, but not one job to a graduate of that school; which builds a Negro hospital with second-rate equipment, then commands black patients and student-doctors to go there whether they will or no; or which, out of the kindness of its heart, erects yet another separate, segregated, shut-off, Jim Crow Y.M.C.A.
Negro writers can expose those white labor leaders who keep their unions closed against Negro workers and prevent the betterment of all workers.
We can expose, too, the sick-sweet smile of organized religion—which lies about what it doesn’t know, and about what it does know. And the half-voodoo, half-clown, face of revivalism, dulling the mind with the clap of its empty hands.
Expose, also, the false leadership that besets the Negro people—bought and paid for leadership, owned by capital, afraid to open its mouth except in the old conciliatory way so advantageous to the exploiters.
And all the economic roots of race hatred and race fear.
And the Contentment Tradition of the O-lovely-Negroes school of American fiction, which makes an ignorant black face and a Carolina head filled with superstition, appear more desirable than a crown of gold; the jazz-band; and the O-so-gay writers who make of the Negro’s poverty and misery a dusky funny paper.
And expose war. And the old My-Country-’Tis-of-Thee lie. And the colored American Legion posts strutting around talking about the privilege of dying for the noble Red, White and Blue, when they aren’t even permitted the privilege of living for it. Or voting for it in Texas. Or working for it in the diplomatic service. Or even rising, like every other good little boy, from the log cabin to the White House.
White House is right!
Dear colored American Legion, you can swing from a lynching tree, uniform and all, with pleasure—and nobody’ll fight for you. Don’t you know that? Nobody even salutes you down South, dead or alive, medals or no medals, chevrons or not, no matter how many wars you’ve fought in.
Let Negro writers write about the irony and pathos of the colored American Legion.
“Salute, Mr. White Man!” “Salute, hell! . . . You’re a nigger.”
Or would you rather write about the moon?
Sure, the moon still shines over Harlem. Shines over Scottsboro. Shines over Birmingham, too, I reckon. Shines over Cordie Cheek’s grave, down South.
Write about the moon if you want to. Go ahead. This is a free country.
But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There’s a song that says, “the time ain’t long.” That song is right. Something has got to change in America—and change soon. We must help that change to come.
The moon’s still shining as poetically as ever, but all the stars on the flag are dull. (And the stripes, too.)
We want a new and better America, where there won’t be any poor, where there won’t be any more Jim Crow, where there won’t be any lynchings, where there won’t be any muni-tion makers, where we won’t need philanthropy, nor charity, nor the New Deal, nor Home Relief.
We want an America that will be ours, a world that will be ours—we Negro workers and white workers! Black writers and white!
We’ll make that world!
Commentary
Anger made Langston distraught; it made him physically ill according to his biographer, Arnold Rampersad! However, in this speech read on his behalf at the First American Writers Congress, a who’s who of American writers, he was angry. He recognized that the Hooverite political rhetoric of rug-ged individualism and the philosophical virtuousness of an unregulated economy had been sustained on the backs of laborers and the working poor. This congress, sponsored by the Communist Party USA, was one of the few places that gave dissenting voices space to criticize the economic ethics employed by politicians and magnates, who justified their poor stewardship of the nation’s economy with jingoistic rhetoric. Some of the writers were communist, some were democrats, some were troubled liberals, and some socialists. Collectively these writers were disgruntled at a governmen-tal system that left people unhoused, sleeping in doorways and scrounging for food. And it all seems eerily familiar. This gathering of writers recognized that working people of every stripe were being undervalued, too many inadequately housed, and earning unlivable wages. Bromides extolling the American way proved insufficient. In 1935 the Great Depres-sion was unrelenting, and desperation grew. This seismic eco-nomic collapse was global. It took down Wall Street and the monetary capitals of Europe—Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Oslo, Paris, Rome, and Stock-holm. The collapse affected political economies as far east as Manilla in the Philippines and across the Mississippi Delta, which stretched thirty-five thousand miles from southern Illi-nois to the Gulf of Mexico. Labor was marked by a minus sign in the calculus of global economics. Of course, this sounds familiar, like the way technology is now a stand-in for cheaper labor, decreasing workers’ pay while making the ones who have jobs work harder and faster.
At this congress Langston took the opportunity to address specifically his fellow Black writers. He did not discuss what writers might generally say or do about Black folk social conditions, which raises the question: Did he surmise that they would do nothing? For him, the stories of Black America written by Black writers were primary. Their stories of labor, their stories of being freedom seekers, their commu-nity building, and their love of stories were at the forefront. For Langston it was important for Negroes to understand their class solidarities with people in the United States and around the globe. He challenged Black writers in attendance to creatively pen the many lived realities of Black America expansively as working people.
The backdrop to Langston’s speech was frustration with disparities across intersections of culture, faith, and class. The greater public from colonial nations, throughout Europe, and across the United States were dissatisfied. The First World War’s devastation of roughly ten million deaths created tumultuous cultural shifts—migration, women’s suffrage, and urban-ization all threatened the established order. Within Europe these shifts aided the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party, Mussolini’s Republican Fascist Party, and Franco’s Falange in Spain over a thirty-year period following the Great War. And these leaders stoked political wildfires. Fascist politics created a labyrinth of white fantasies—they convinced a majority within their populations that their social anxieties and monetary dispari-ties were solely the fault of others. Pluralism, they stated, was bad. Bad for the youth and bad for the country. Europeans could not coexist ethnically, politically, or religiously. Polit-ical differences had to be eradicated by following the will of a singular political figure, a demigod. These leaders, though not deeply religious, deified traditional values. White male ortho-doxy was in good supply.
Enforced legalities, otherwise known as tradition or God-given, have upheld male tyranny—as once observed by Abigail Adams, the wife of the second United States president, John Adams. Women’s sovereignty, meaning the full control of themselves as persons, has always challenged the male priestly order, so to speak. That order strictly governed and policed intimacies, from control of reproduction to marriages, same-sex relationships, and sex work. Artistic expression from painters, poets, prophets, sculptors, and writers who ques-tioned the established order were either killed or bullied into submission. The traditionalist locked away books, reedited some, and burned others. Everywhere they jealously guarded against egalitarian politics, especially political visions of inclu-sivity and the rights of various nations and peoples. Tradition-alists in the name of order jeopardized due process, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. And throughout they prompted the broader populace to submit to the caudillo in Spain, the führer in Germany, and Il Duce in Italy.
Authoritarianism prevailed! Citizens were expected to give unwavering obedience to one leader. Whatever historical limitations the US Bill of Rights may have had when insti-tuted or that they have today, authoritarianism is far worse. It is stoked by heated rhetoric of gender and racial grievances and resentments. It sets up the conditions of killing fields. And it is now known, through history books and documentary films, that Germany led the way, with country after country systematically murdering Jews, Roma, the disabled, and same-sex loving persons. And since World War II, this pattern has been followed in Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur, and Rwanda. All resulting horrors were worse than the fourteenth-century Italian poet Dante’s epic journey through hell.
Langston’s congenial personality was often mistaken as optimistic. As a writer, however, he was a keen observer of human behavior, understood human resentment and hateful-ness. The Ways of White Folks, his collection of short stories, was a well-honed reflection on how racism affected the most mundane of daily interactions and routines. He was a living witness to how Southern states legally conscribed the demo-cratic freedoms of their Black residents. He observed across the United States how Black people were stigmatized and considered national pariahs. He understood the political practices of elite white Southerners, who under the guise of democracy economically repressed the poor and promoted politically murderous actions against Black dissent of any kind. Throughout the 1930s Langston used his writerly voice to decry barbarity and commercialism used to justify the callousness that guided the body politic.
Langston described the lives of the Black working class with wide-ranging empathy. He painted words so they might appreciate their own existence. Blues and jazz–inflected verses described their joys, despairs, heartbreaks, and laughter. He dignified them without Francophone categorical tropes or clunky sociological categorizations. Theory was formed and created from their everyday intonations and language. Before Jazz musicians focused on the theoretical basis of their music throughout the 1940s and ’50s, Langston and his writing compatriots, such as Zora Neal Hurston, showed that democ-racy was in the syntax of everyday Black poetry. People on the streets from Harlem to Hattiesburg to Houston had their own language to describe the struggles of living in partially demo-cratic society. They framed their own joy and pathos colloqui-ally. Their own communities held frames of reference for doing social analyses. The categorical language of academic specialists labeled them as victims but viewed them as agents of self-deter-mination in their own right, unlike Langston’s verse.
Langston’s public anger was courageous. He took his verse to the cells of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young Black teens falsely accused of rape, which would replay itself anal-ogously in the 1989 Central Park Five case and read to these barely literate young men. The Scottsboro case was the cause célèbre of the 1930s. And Langston supported these falsely accused and convicted persons by writing, marketing, and selling his verse for their defense fund.
However, his critics see this era of his writing as lacking fullness. They take a dim view of his writing in this era. They see it as less creative, especially his verse. They do not view his poetry being as interesting as his use of blues meters to describe his feelings and the people he loved. However, many of Langston’s critics rarely state their own bourgeois biases or their own middle-class cultural predilections that inform their critiques as to why political poetry is or is not expressive or original. I make no claims to be a literary critic, but as a reader of Langston’s poetry, whatever shortfalls they contain, in this moment he expresses the anger that people felt then and now about being treated as less than equal.
The question is as a reader why did critics shoot down Langston’s corpus of this era? Is social anger not good art? I wondered how Black readers felt when they read his poem “Black Workers”:
The bees work
Their work is taken from them. We are like the bees—
But it won’t last Forever
Or when they read his poem “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria”:
For living . . . à la carte?? Come to the Waldorf-Astoria! LISTEN, HUNGRY ONES!
Look! See what Vanity Fair says about the new Waldorf-Astoria:
“All the luxuries of private home. ”
Now, won’t that be charming when the last flop-house
has turned you down this winter?
The point is not to argue that every Langston poem was remarkable in this era. Like every artist there are better expressions than others. His paeans to Vladimir Lenin and the Soviet Union read in hindsight like those of a fervent, new, religious convert. Marx was running all through him like glos-solalia overtakes the tongue of a Pentecostal. Though some of his poetry was overly enthusiastic, it should not be disdained. I refuse to adhere to the notion that because he advocated for justice and political change in this era of his poetry, the creative works were completely reductionistic. This would be like saying the poetry of the eighth-century BCE Hebrew prophets had no beauty in their verse as they called the ancient biblical kings to be more just. Simply because his publishing house, Knopf, refused to publish his more overtly political poetry does not mean it was all bad. Rather their refusal says volumes about the publishers and literary critics who shared philosophical affinities with the dominant political ideology that governed the economic status quo at the time.
This was a period filled with desperation, people hopping trains hoboing through towns and across states looking for work, persons on the street drowning their sorrows in poorly distilled whiskeys of every taste, trading their bodies for the next meal or few extra dollars, and fearing state-sanctioned, racial violence. If a snapshot were taken from North to South, Black unemployment was roughly 50 percent and despera-tion was an understatement. In this moment Langston asked his fellow writers to stand alongside their people as subjects and not derisive objects. Long before contemporary theorists drew upon jargon-laden theory to describe the sufferings of undignified Black people, Langston asked his fellow writers to show and not tell what the twinning of capitalism and racism did to the life chances of Black working people. The art of writing required the writer to give fuller portraits of Black humanity not from the upper reaches of Athens but from a place of solidarity with human joys and sufferings. The Negro writer in essence must follow the journey of the aspirational college graduate hitting a wall where the highest rank they can earn is maid or driver, or the migrant who works hard only to become the drunkard sleeping in the store’s doorway, or the bright youngster who grows angry, despairing, and sullen at her life chances. Exactly who are the boys and girls who came to hustle their bodily wares on the street? What did they run away from, who kidnapped and exploited them, who did they befriend, and what were their fears and failures? Solidarity meant not standing above or outside a people’s struggles but showing their lives as multidimensional.
What was also noticeable in Langston’s speech was his dismissal of religion. Divine goodness or providence produced docility and inaction. It kept people talking about brother-hood and sisterhood without any coordinated effort to alle-viate the underlying barriers and suffering that kept working people from building true community. As a convert to the gospel according to Marx, Langston found his opiate in mate-rialism. Though there was a considerable decline in worship attendance, citizens, though cynical, continued to hold on to a deeply ingrained religiosity as an ethical guide. In the United States, evangelists, pastors, and priests exercised a degree of moral suasion over the consciousness of everyday life. So, Langston paid a heavy cost for his iconoclasm regarding reli-gion among white evangelicals.
Though Langston did not read his deeply passionate speech in person at the congress, it was like so many youth-filled movements, from Black Lives Matters, to the Black Panther Party, from the Congress on Racial Equality, to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Langston’s indignation spewed with the intensity of lava overflowing. If he shied away from angry personal confrontations, he was not above confronting his fellow writers in this oration. His speech was concerned about the antidemocratic economics of racism and its philanthropy. Charities, he believed, were no substitute for fixing structural inequalities created by govern-mental policies. Acts of philanthropy were stopgap measures; they were not full investments by the state to transform social conditions. Langston, as a black Kansan, did not have to be leftist to understand the difference between philanthropy and structural solutions. He recognized that the Homestead Act (1862), which Anglo-European immigrants and migrants used to acquire “government lands” from Indigenous nations, benefited the conquerors, including the small Black Kansan population. North of the Kansas River in Lawrence, Kansas, Langston’s childhood home served as a lesson in power, the power of a centralized government to build wealth for one class of people over another. He knew from his living memory that the Kaw people had been displaced structurally. Philan-thropic efforts directed toward the Kaw, from which the word Kansas is derived, could not undo what had occurred with federal intervention. Benevolence was no solution for gross injustice created by the government.
Langston wrote passionately. He charged Negro writers to galvanize Black Southerners with their essays, poetry, and stories. Ironically, he criticized DuBois for his view on the meaning of art after his publication in Crisis, “Criteria for Negro Art.” DuBois argued that art served a propagandist purpose in a racist society for Black people:
Thus, all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy.
I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.
Was Langston, under the influence of Marxism, forming a consensus with DuBois on what art meant for writers? Were they so different? Well, yes! In the “Negro Artists and the Racial Mountain,” published in The Nation in June of 1926, months before DuBois’s response in October of that year. Langston pushed Negro writers toward both freedom and responsibility. Negro writers must never grotesquely ape the normative culture of Anglo-European writers as though values and style were only held by one group of people. And there is no subject too taboo to broach. Writing in the various vernac-ulars of Black people was revealing and holistic. He believed writers’ words possessed power to challenge the distortions layered over the beauty of fighting against various forms of old and new enslavements. No deforming narratives, no senti-mental stories of happy darkies, and no stereotypical tropes of the master and slave. Though Langston rejected an orthodox reading of Christianity, I cannot but help thinking he viewed the writer in a manner like the most gnostic of the New Testa-ment gospel texts: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people” (John 1:15; NRSV). The writer’s task was to shine light in the darkness that was via the word. The word and the light were the recombinant DNA remixing new life. The writers’ words were one part of building solidarity alongside a people’s struggles to end murderous and repressive tyranny in the Southland and radically transform the region.
For Langston the task of the Negro writer, not the writer in general, was to give voice and hope to common people in their daily interactions. It was the Negro writer’s responsi-bility to enliven the discourse of their respective communities through their essays, novels, plays, poetry, and stories. And he deserves credit for always attempting to align his words with his actions. He toured the South twice, once under the tutelage of Zora Neal Hurston, doing readings in churches, historically black colleges, schools, and theaters wherever the folk gathered. He saw their realities and reenvisioned them as a writer. The South’s contradictions were not special; they belonged to the nation, as he ironically penned in his poem “The South” in his collection The Weary Blues:
The lazy, laughing South With blood on its mouth. The sunny-faced South,
Beast-strong, Idiot-brained.
The child-minded South Scratching in the dead fire’s ashes For a Negro’s bones.
Cotton and the moon,
Warmth, earth, warmth,The sky, the sun, the stars,
The magnolia-scented South.
Beautiful, like a woman, Seductive as a dark-eyed whore,
Passionate, cruel,
Honey-lipped, syphilitic—That is the South.
And I, who am black, would love her But she spits in my face.
And I, who am black,
Would give her many rare gifts But she turns her back upon me.
So now I seek the North—The cold-faced North,
For she, they say,
Is a kinder mistress,
And in her house my children May escape the spell of the South.
The task of the Negro writer was to give voice to the struggles and solidarities in order to build tomorrow. Langston offered these words in a world a great deal less mindful than our own has become through terrible, ongoing struggles. Nevertheless, the Black writers’ task continues to build a more free future in spite of the complications of what freedom means for our collective and individual selves. This is the Black writers’ greatest gift to each and every one of us.
Excerpt from the bookMy America: Langston Hughes on Democracy by Randal M. Jelks copyright © 2026 Broadleaf Books. Reproduced by permission.
