Langston Hughes is mostly associated with the “Harlem Renaissance,” when the borough became a hotbed of Black intellectual and cultural life in the early 20th century. Yet the new forms of life, expression, and thought that emerged from Harlem were, above all else, political. In 1919, for example, Cyril Briggs and others founded the African Blood Brotherhood, a small underground revolutionary organization that later merged with the Communist Party. Hughes’ poems, plays, novels, columns, and other works were also fundamentally political in nature. In many ways, the politics that shaped Hughes and many of his fellow travelers at the time were inspired by a monumental event across the Atlantic: the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
Hughes came to and approached socialism from an internationalist perspective, traveling widely in search of revolutionary purpose. Working on a freighter and visiting several countries in West Africa and spending time in pre-revolutionary Cuba in the 1920s, on top of his experience of racism and the Great Depression in the U.S., left him disillusioned with global labor exploitation but galvanized his political outlook.
Hughes, often referred to as the “Poet Laureate for the African American people,” was inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution and openly supported and participated in the communist struggle. He joined leftist groups like the John Reed Club and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and became a vocal critic of segregation, police violence, and imperialism.
In 1932, at the invitation of the Mezhrapbpom (Workers’ International Relief) and his friend Louise Thompson, he visited the Soviet Union to act in a film about the anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggle in the U.S. Interestingly, the film never made it to the screen, in no small part because of Hughes’ interventions.
Upon reading the script about national oppression in the U.S., he was “astonished.” “I laughed until I cried,” he wrote in his autobiography,” because the writer meant well, but knew so little about his subject and the result was a pathetic hodgepodge of good intentions and faulty facts” [1]. He brought the problems to the producers. After a few assertions that it was fine because it had the Comintern’s approval, they took his edits to their superiors. Eventually, according to Hughes, about half of the film studio’s executives were fired for giving the error-laden film the green light [2]. As an apology, he and the rest of the cast traveled throughout the Eastern regions of the Soviet Union, although Hughes left the group to go out on his own.
Hughes recollected Moscow as one of the friendliest big cities in the world:
“On a crowded bus, nine times out of ten, some Russian would say, “Negrochanski tovarish—Negro comrade—take my seat!” On the streets queuing up for newspapers, for cigarettes, or soft drinks, often folks in the line would say, “Let the Negro comrade go forward.” If you demurred, they would insist, “Please! Visitor to the front” [3].
Despite the mishaps throughout his stay, it “was transformative for his artistic and political development” [4]. Given the deep-seated white supremacy of daily life in the U.S., it is not hard to understand why Hughes, like his later friend Paul Robeson and so many other towering Black figures, looked favorably to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. He never joined the Communist Party or claimed to have studied any communist theory. As he wrote in one 1946 column:
“I have been in the Soviet Union, so I am not speaking from theory or long distance information read in books… I do not claim that the Soviet Union is a paradise. It is not. But the steps toward an earthly paradise reach higher today on the soil of the Soviet Union than they do anywhere else in this troubled world” [5]
In 1948, U.S. Senator Jack Tenney’s “Fact-Finding” Committee on UnAmerican Activities denounced Hughes as a communist. In March of 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy called Hughes to testify before the Subcommittee on Investigations. Under the crushing weight of McCarthyism, Hughes’ publicly distanced himself from the communist and progressive movement.
None of this alters our remembrance of Hughes not only for his fight against racism and imperialism and his contributions to and celebration of Black life, politics, and culture, but for his vision of a global, anti-racist and socialist future.
This International Workers’ Day, we republish Hughes’ famous May Day poem, which first appeared in 1938 in A New Song, published by the communist publishing house of the International Workers Order [6]. The poem captures Hughes’ spirit, celebrating worker solidarity and the power of collective action.
Chant for May Day
To be read by a Workman with, for background, the rhythmic waves of rising and re-rising Mass Voices, multiplying like the roar of the sea.
WORKER: The first of May:
When the flowers break through the earth,
When the sap rises in the trees.
When the birds come back from the South.
WORKERS:
Be like the flowers,
10 VOICES: Bloom in the strength of your unknown power,
20 VOICES: Grow out of the passive earth,
40 VOICES: Grow strong with Union,
All hands together—
To beautify this hour, this spring,
And all the springs to come
50 VOICES: Forever for the workers!
WORKER: Workers:
10 VOICES: Be like the sap rising in the trees,
20 VOICES: Strengthening each branch,
40 VOICES: No part neglected—
50 VOICES: Reaching all the world.
WORKER: All workers:
10 VOICES: White workers,
10 OTHERS: Black workers,
10 OTHERS: Yellow workers,
10 OTHERS: Workers in the islands of the sea—
50 VOICES: Life is everywhere for you,
WORKER: When the sap of your own strength rises
50 VOICES: Life is everywhere.
10 VOICES: May Day!
20 VOICES: May Day!
40 VOICES: May Day!
50 VOICES: When the earth is new,
WORKER: Proletarians of all the world:
20 VOICES: Arise,
40 VOICES: Grow strong,
60 VOICES: Take Power,
80 VOICES: Till the forces of the earth are yours
100 VOICE: From this hour.
References
[1] Langston Hughes, Autobiography: I wander as I wonder (vol.14), ed. J. McLaren (Missouri: University of Missouri Press: 2003), 101.
[2] Ibid., 102.
[3] Ibid., 99.
[4] Catherine Peckinpaugh Vrtis, “Proletarian plays for a proletarian audience: Langston Hughes and Harvest,” Journal of African American Studies 25, no. 3 (2021): 477.
[5] Langston Hughes, “The Soviet Union,” in Langston Hughes and the “Chicago Defender:” Essays on race, politics, and culture, 1942-62, ed. C.C. De Santis (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 167.
[6] Langston Hughes, “Chant for May Day,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. A. Rampersad and D. Roessel (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 209-210.