Langston Hughes was a poet, playwright, and journalist who made the lives, language, and music of ordinary Black people the center of American literature. Born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1901, he published "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" while still a teenager. He became a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance, writing poetry rooted in the rhythms of blues and jazz. In his 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," he called on Black artists to stop seeking white approval and to create proudly from their own culture.

As the Great Depression deepened, Hughes turned toward the left. In 1932 he traveled to the Soviet Union with Louise Thompson and a group of Black artists, and he saw there a society that claimed to have ended racial discrimination. He wrote revolutionary poems such as "Good Morning Revolution" and supported the Scottsboro Boys. He reported from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, where Black volunteers fought fascism. His poem "Let America Be America Again" spoke for the worker, the farmer, the immigrant, and the dispossessed, all those for whom the American dream had never been real. He also translated the work of Nicolás Guillén and Jacques Roumain, building literary ties across the Black Atlantic.

During the McCarthy era, Hughes was hauled before a Senate committee in 1953 and pressured to renounce his radical past, one of many artists the Red Scare tried to silence. His work endured that repression. Through poems, plays, and his beloved Jesse B. Semple stories, he insisted that art belongs to the people and must speak to their dreams deferred and their demand to be free. His legacy remains a model for cultural workers committed to telling the truth of the oppressed in their own voice.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*