By 1942, despite the death of its publisher and spiritual leader Robert Abbott, The Chicago Defender remained the premier national African-American newspaper. With distribution along the huge rail nexus that centered on Chicago, The Defender reached readers throughout the nation every week. Its creative mix of news and commentary made it an important tool in the struggle for equality, as did its coverage of the many crimes of segregation. In the summer of 1942, the Defender's Metz T.P. Lochard offered noted author Langston Hughes a weekly 1,000-word column. On October 29 Hughes accepted and added a new position to his rich resume: that of columnist for America's foremost black newspaper.
Not a New Journalist
Although today we remember Hughes primarily as one of the major poets and short story writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and accordingly focus on his work in these genres, his prolific output of essays and short commentaries is equally worthy of attention. The devastating sense of irony which Hughes deployed in poems like “Dinner Guest: Me” is very much present in the columns he wrote for The Defender, where it is sharpened to a piercing point and directed at whichever happened to be the most egregious offense against sensibility, equality, and humanity of that week. Always closely topical, Hughes' columns nevertheless manage to stretch beyond the news of the moment and address fundamental issues of society and culture.
Hughes' work for The Defender consistently pushes the boundaries of journalism. Though he attained fame in the interwar years as a writer of poetry and short fiction, Hughes also worked as a foreign correspondent, covering the Spanish Civil War and touring the Soviet Union to observe its social and political transformation. His columns draw upon this early work, but though his commentary was always current and dealt with "specific issues" per request of Lochard, there was little journalistic about them. They were opinion pieces, wonderful combinations of the argumentative and literary essay and the short newspaper column.
“Dixie Nordics” and the Fight for Freedom
Langston Hughes was not, perhaps, the first to point out the obvious hypocrisy of the United States involvement in Second World War, but he did so quite regularly during the conflict. With its army and defense industries segregated, and with the Jim Crow regime unchecked in the South, the United States asked its black citizens to join the fight for freedom in Europe and the Pacific. Hughes and others wondered at the idea of opposing oppression abroad while imposing inequality at home. With characteristic irony, Hughes wondered whether “our white folks” were willing to fight at home for the same freedoms they fought for in the fields of France. It seemed they weren’t.
In his January 1943 column “No Half-Freedoms”, Hughes draws on his previous experiences as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War to exhort African-Americans to fight for full equality and complete freedom, as he believed the Republicans had in Spain. He quotes famous Republican poet La Passionaria’s declaration that “it is better to die standing up/than to live on your knees” and notes how much the meaning changes if you invert the words: quite easily, he suggests, we can fall for half-measures and find ourselves “liv[ing] on our knees”. “Shall we ask only for half-freedoms that move nobody to action”, he asks rhetorically, “or for the great freedoms that this war is supposed to be about?” The answer for Hughes was clear: the United States' two-faced policy should not be tolerated. When his own draft notice came in the mail, Hughes submitted a note of protest along with his questionnaire. He was not called upon to serve.
With his talents preserved for the home front, Hughes continued to lash out against the systems of oppression built into the war machine. His columns often compare the racist measures of the U.S. to Hitler’s Germany, calling racist Southerners “local Nordics” and their Jim Crow system “local fascism”. He hearkens back to his experiences in Spain and Russia and notes that in neither the communist nor the fascist state did he feel his race as acutely as in our own democratic states. In a November, 1945 column he likens the Klan to the SS Storm Troopers, calling them “brothers under the same skin.”
No End in Sight
The end of World War II saw no change in Hughes determination to protest the injustices of the home front. How could it have? With millions living under de jure segregation and with the constant threat of arbitrary imprisonment or, worse, lynching, and countless others suffering under the somewhat more subtle system of de facto racism, the war was far from over. Hughes continued to demand that the United States’ campaign for democracy abroad be continued at home. On November 6, 1948, he wrote in one of his strongest columns, “U.S. Likes Nazis and Franco Better Than Its Own Negroes”:
“Right now, it is incumbent upon them to teach the rest of the world democracy – so we shouldn’t be so rude as to expect them to bother much with democracy at home – at least not in relation to poor folks, Indians, and Negroes.”
In this column, as in many others, we see a man frustrated by the inconsistencies of his nation. Both domestically and internationally, Americans were at the fore of the fight for certain progressive, democratic ideas, and simultaneously woefully behind on other freedoms, especially those pertaining to race. Hughes traveled the nation on the regular lecture circuit, and although he saw improvement in race relations – particularly the slackening of Jim Crow regulations on trains – there was little consistency in the improvements. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, his columns documented the outrages, injustices and inhumanities suffered by African-Americans in their day-to-day lives.
Still a Storyteller
Hughes columns freely mix the elements of the argumentative essay and the anecdote (or what is the same, the short story). A frequent topic of his columns was the impossibility of an African-American traveling with dignity. A typical article of this style begins with a conflictual situation: the refusal of service in a dining car, the refusal of service at a restaurant, the refusal of accommodation at a hotel. It then continues on to a resolution, usually a victorious one brought about by the quick-witted passenger, diner or room-seeker. The worker begrudgingly accepts that the protester has a point and agrees to serve him or her, or else is tricked into doing so.
These stories – for even when they are true, they are an extension of Hughes’ short fiction – demonstrate the absurdity of the Jim Crow system. Many of these anecdotes turn on the arbitrary nature of the color line: in one story, Hughes takes his seat in an all-white dining car and is reluctantly approached by the steward, who asks him in a whisper whether he might be Puerto Rican. Hughes responds that he’s “just hungry”, and the steward, apparently relieved to avoid a confrontation, serves him dinner without incident.
"To Hold No Keys"
In one of his most insightful columns, in the summer of 1943, Langston Hughes demonstrates his thorough understanding of psychology and history alongside his well-known talents with the English language. He attempts to describe the reasons for the Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles, and does so in a way that only he can manage: simultaneously condemning the racism and oppression that sparked the disturbance and making its flashpoint comprehensible to all. Calling the riots a natural response to the Depression which had so devastated the nation, Hughes writes:
"It made [the Zoot Suiters] feel good to go to extremes [in their dress]. In light of the poverty of the past, too much becomes JUST ENOUGH for them. A key chain six times too big is just long enough to hold NO keys" (emphasis in original).
In this article, as in many others, Hughes reached across lines of color and ethnicity, defending the cause of Mexican-American youths and trying hard to make their anger comprehensible to poor white Americans in whom an empathetic spark might be struck. Behind the neat phrases, biting irony and pointed criticism, Hughes remained hearteningly optimistic about America and Americas, including his frequent oppressors who he lovingly addressed as "our white folk". His work for The Chicago Defender, as much as his poetry and fiction, demonstrates the depth of affection which he felt for his nation, despite all of its shortcomings. It also demonstrates how much he suffered from the alienation and dehumanization it inflicted upon him, and how relentlessly he fought against it.
Sources
De Santis, Christopher D., editor. Langston Hughes & The Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics and Culture, 1942-1962. Chicago and Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press, 1995.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume II: 1941-1967, I Dream A World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Tracy, Steven C, editor. A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Christian Aguiar - Christian Aguiar is a passionate reader - as evidenced by his terrible eyesight and calloused index finger.
Join the Conversation