Langston Hughes in the Classroom

In 2022, Langston Hughes is a well-known and well-respected author. Most American literature anthologies include his work, some children memorize and recite his poetry (“Mother to Son” or “The Negro Mother”), and schools are even named after him.

In the 1960s, however, Hughes was usually left out of textbooks and absent from even high school libraries. Why? Hughes wrote about poverty, about people having to pawn clothes to get money for food. And he wrote about race, the Black experience in particular. In his poem “Let America Be America Again,” for example, he speaks about the way racism complicates the American Dream and states that “America never was America to me.” Reading instruction in the 1950s and early 1960s relied on textbooks set in affluent suburbs with sentences such as, “Run, Jane. Run with Spot.” At the time, the ideas in Hughes’ works were deemed both too unpleasant and too political for young readers. Hughes was also controversial because he had traveled to the Soviet Union and praised some of its practices. During the Cold War, this automatically associated him with communism. He was considered too radical to teach.

Yet many of Langston Hughes’ works were not radical at all. His first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), included some sad events, but it ends with hope for the future. It stresses the importance of family and education. It would have been a wonderful book for children in the 1960s to read. The Dream Keeper (1932) included only poems that Hughes intended for young readers. Included in that book was Hughes’ inspirational poem “Dreams”:

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

When Mr. Alums gives Kenny the Langston Hughes book to read to the fifth graders, he probably was introducing extra material to his class, beyond what he was told to use in his curriculum. We never learn exactly what Kenny read, but Mr. Alums must have been a progressive man who believed in encouraging his students and providing them with role models who looked like them.

Since Mr. Alums proclaims that Kenny’s future is unlimited, he very well may have handed Kenny The Dream Keeper. In 1954, Hughes began publishing nonfiction books for young people, including Famous American Negroes, another title Mr. Alums might have handed to Kenny. In this book, Kenny might have read about Harriet Tubman or Ralph Bunche. (Famous American Negroes still provides useful historical information today.)

By the end of the twentieth century, Langston Hughes’ fame was well established. In 1960s, he received the NAACP’s most prestigious award, the Spingarn Medal. In 1961, he was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a very rare honor for a writer. Once questioned about his loyalty to the United States, in 1965 Hughes was visiting Europe on behalf of the U.S. State Department. By 2002, his face appeared on a U.S. postage stamp. Today, students will almost always find Langston Huges’ work in their literature anthologies.

We can see from the treatment of Hughes that the same person and even the same books can be viewed differently over time.

About the Author

Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper is a professor emerita of English at Spellman College and author of Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories by Langston Hughes.