Advanced, Repressed, and Popular: Langston Hughes During the Cold War1

College Literature, Spring 2006 by Scott, Jonathan

The need to independently store facts about African Americans was always linked for Hughes to the nurturing and development of politically active and independent African American popular audiences. What is at stake is the writer's method. In terms of method, Hughes approached writing during the 30s and 40s from two angles simultaneously. Politically, he served as a Black national advocate for international socialism, mainly through his journalism and poetry, while as an artist he asserted the international scale of the American national struggle to abolish racial oppression, precisely by making his interventions at the level of national popular culture and through the formation of national popular aesthetic tastes and preferences. In contrast to Black communists like Claude McKay and Richard Wright, for instance, Hughes approached literature as a dynamic site from which these two battles could be fought at the same time, "not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each," in the words of DuBois (1969, 52). Especially in his popular histories for youth, Hughes set out to answer DuBois's call, and through literary forms newly accessible to the masses of American society.

As Cedric Robinson has observed astutely in his history of the black radical tradition Black Marxism (1983), what distinguished McKay and Wright from their black radical co-workers was the fact that they came to communism directly through black nationalism: McKay through Garveyism and Wright through the black working class of the American South. According to Robinson, this is why they ended-up rejecting the communist solution to racial oppression (1983, 417-18). Yet had he studied Langston Hughes-in fact, not a single mention is made of Hughes in Black Marxisma different conclusion might have come from his book: that communism and black radicalism are not irreconcilable ways of seeing the world, and not therefore doomed to mutual distrust and indifference, but rather are actually one of the more successful crossovers of our times, a far more successful crossover than that between, say, European-American trade unionism and communism, or environmentalist!! and communism. Moreover, that these supposedly antithetical worldviews could find common ground in popular literature-in the literary collage form and in children's literature-calls into question Robinson's thesis. Hughes's remarkable success as a black socialist writer goes a long way in explaining his omission from Robinson's study.

Although the conclusions drawn in Black Marxism cannot be adequately addressed here, they do provide a starting point for understanding Hughes's writings for youth. First, Hughes's emphasis on the worldliness or internationalism of African American culture circumvented the polar opposition between black nationalism and international communism by presenting and promoting a way of thinking that depended on both for its "historical uniqueness," to use one of Robinson's central terms. Second, his writings for children in particular revealed as a strategic site of political struggle, at the height of the cold war, the task of winning over to socialism America's youth. Despite the fact that many of these works left out DuBois, for instance-a point repeated needlessly in the scholarship on Hughes, since the works in question were not about intellectuals-or that several were grossly censored by anticommunist editors, there are excellent reasons to study them. That they have not been studied at all tells us two things: that Chuck Ds resentments of white American media culture speak direcdy to a failure of method and not so much to questions of media access and representation, nor to the commodification of African American culture, which have been the main foci of antiracist media critique; and that, more obviously, a great deal of critical work remains to be done on the writing of Hughes.