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Langston Hughes - 2017 Missouri Public Affairs Hall of Fame

231 views · Published 8 April 2017 · 1:43 · Indexed 8 November 2026

Channel: Missouri State University · 2017 · Education

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James Langston Hughes was born on a troubled road in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. Rigid, racial restrictions in the state forbade his father, James Nathaniel Hughes, from gaining admission to the bar because he was black. Hughes came to understand that these circumstances were partially responsible for his father abandoning him and his mother, Carrie. 
Hughes held little bitterness and until 1915 – when his custodial grandmother, Mary Leary Langston, died – he grew up a lonely child believing not in people but in fiction and poetry. But Hughes did enjoy a boyhood close to relatives in Kansas City, Missouri. After Mrs. Langston’s death, he later joined his mother and her second husband in Lincoln, Illinois. There he wrote his first poem. The family moved and briefly lived together in Cleveland, Ohio.

Abandoned again, Langston lived alone, received a first-rate education and published his first works at progressive Central High School. His hallmark poem – “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” written in 1920 on a trip to Mexico to discuss college possibilities with his father – set him on the road that, by the time of his death in 1967, the world recognized him as the premier poet of the black American experience.

More info on the Missouri Public Affairs Hall of Fame: http://publicaffairs.missouristate.edu/halloffame/

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