With his Aunt Ethel Dudley “Toy” Harper, 1944. Photograph by Marion Palfi (illustration credit 24)
With his Aunt Ethel Dudley “Toy” Harper, 1944. Photograph by Marion Palfi (illustration credit 24)
You say I O.K.ed
LONG DISTANCE?
O.K.ed it when?
My Goodness, Central,
That was then!
In 1941, Hughes finally settled down in Harlem. Moving in with Emerson and Toy Harper, he would live with them for the rest of his life. First he shared their cramped apartment at 634 St. Nicholas Avenue, and later they lived together at 20 East 127th Street. In the early 1940s, he created two of his most memorable characters. Starting in 1943, the genial Jesse B. Semple, or “Simple,” became a stellar feature in his column for The Chicago Defender (and later in his column for the New York Post). Around the same time, Alberta K. Johnson, or “Madam,” showed up in a number of poems. World War II and the civil rights struggle shaped much of Hughes’s work in this period. He strongly advocated what was called the “Double V” strategy—victory over Hitler abroad and victory over Jim Crow at home. Jim Crow’s Last Stand, a pamphlet that contains many of his poems about race and the war, was published in 1943.
TO NOËL SULLIVAN [TLS]
Bill of Rights Day,
December 15, 1941,
Chicago, Illinois.1
Dear Noël,
As usual there is so much I would like to write you about and, as usual, time is flying, flying, and I have got to leave the Rosenwald office where I have been working and go home and pack to take off for New York as my thirty-day ticket is up tomorrow. Really, how time flies!
Your letter came and I was deeply distressed to learn the sad news of your sister’s illness. She is a sweet and lovable person whose simple, kind enthusiasm about the little things of life made me warm to her immediately. From the tone of your letter, I am terribly afraid her illness may be the same that took my mother away.2 Knowing its inevitable end, the only thing one can do is try to make the final months as comfortable and friendly as possible. And keep loneliness and fear as far away as those things can be kept. Certainly faced with that final limit on time—time that most of us misuse so carelessly and so badly—I can understand the shortcomings that you feel in yourself—although I have found you always the most thoughtful person in all the world to those whom you love. To say what your friendship has meant to me would take more pages than I have ever written in any of my books. The way you stood by me last winter in my various and varied vicissitudes makes me believe in you like the early Christians must have believed in that rock on which the church was founded. (What I am really trying to say is that I know you have within you the strength and love and power to make the coming weeks for your sister full of warmth and affection that will bear her up through days that might, without you, be too full of helplessness and pain.)
My trip East was a pleasant one, and the little surprise of the candy and the book in my bag helped to make it so! That little book was useful in preparing a broadcast which Arna |Bontemps| and I did for Columbia—or rather the portion of a special Bill of Rights SALUTE TO FREEDOM program aired locally here yesterday on which the Governor of Illinois spoke, the Ballad For Americans was sung, and Canada Lee of NATIVE SON3 did our portion—a short sketch of contributions of Negroes to American life based largely on the lives of W. C. Handy and George Washington Carver,4 both sons of slaves, who came up—thanks to the positive side of American democracy—to positions of eminence and usefulness in our commonwealth. They point the way toward ever greater fulfillment of the American dream. Ending with my poem, “I’m making a road … …” done with very stirring background music. It was quite a thrilling broadcast with many soldiers and sailors in the audience.
Jake Weinstein was there, too. The Caytons (my hosts) and I had dinner with them,5 and spoke much of you. I read my poems to a group of young folks from his temple for which they sent me a check for $35.00 and a most beautiful letter. Miss Carr6 of Hull House (who succeeded Jane Addams) was there, and invited me to come and live at Hull House and write whenever I might wish. She is an amazingly vital and amusing Irish woman—a physically bigger edition of Una |Jeffers|.
I hope things came out all right with Lee |Crowe|. Did they? He had so looked forward to these holidays with his parents.
How much I am regretting not being in California these days. The papers here have much about the blackouts and alarms there. But perhaps New York will be equally exciting and live. I will let you know. We were all certainly shocked here last Sunday by the Japanese attack. But Chicago life still goes on just about the same. Except that around the corner from the Community House where I’m staying the police closed up a Japanese restaurant the night war was announced—but it has since reopened. It was a mistake—the owner being not Japanese—but Chinese!.…. Has there been many mix-ups of the sort on the coast? I imagine so. They say all the Orientals here on the University of Chicago campus have been asked to wear buttons identifying their nationality so that the Siamese and others be not taken for the enemy. The American born Japs wear American flags.…. What is happening to poor Ota?7 Let me know.
And how is Eulah |Pharr|? I hope better.
BE SURE AND READ in this month’s POETRY (December) a review of Jeffers’ book by Stanley Kunitz under the title, “The Day Is A Poem.”8 It says very clearly some of the things we had been thinking and worrying about, and is a clearer analysis of his work than any of us arrived at, I believe.
Marius’ letter!9 Well, I guess he won’t be getting out now! Not right away.
I’m sending you under separate cover, along with some clippings and things, a copy of a letter from George Ficke10 in exchange.
Thanks a lot for the snap shots from |Richmond| Barthé. A young Negro photographer here has just taken some excellent pictures of me (if a bit sur-realiste). I’m sending you copies.
I’m glad Tony is back helping you. My mail has piled up like a mountain since I’ve been here. I’ve been devoting my days to creation, however, working at the Rosenwald Fund where they have qui<et> and delightful rooms to work in. Arna |Bontemps|’s office is just down the hall. He sends his best to you.
I saw a most amusing dog-stocking for the Christmas tree for Joel and Greta and the puppies so I sent it on out to them then and there. I trust it’s reached the farm by now. How I hated to leave Hollow Hills! And I hope it will not be too long before I may return. And remember, if ever you need me let me know, and I’ll be there! My plans now call for my return to Chicago for a program in February and the try-out of the first of my Fellowship playlets which I have almost finished while here this time.11 The Chicago papers (even Hearst) have interviewed me and been most cordial in their write-ups so I have offers for more lectures here after the New Year. My book |Shakespeare in Harlem| comes out Feb. 16 and CBS is arranging a broadcast from here then, too. I’ll let you know the day and hour. Over OF MEN AND BOOKS where I appeared before, the Northwestern University program.12
But until further notice, write me c/o my aunt, MRS. TOY HARPER, 634 St. Nicholas Avenue, New York. And ask Eulah to forward mail there. And would you be so good (since I neglected to do it) |as to| write for me on the enclosed post card the addresses I wanted for Christmas and mail it back. (This so you won’t have that “I must write a letter” feeling, too.) But when you do have a chance to write, tell me all the news. <E>specially about the blackouts. (Better disconnect the little lighthouse lest some unwitting guest turn it on!)
My love to Marie |Short|. And the Jeffers.
Affectionately,
Langston
634 St. Nicholas Avenue,
New York, New York,
January 27, 1942.
Dear Maxim,
Mr. William Alexander of the Office of Civilian Defense, who flew over from Washington the other day to see me and bought me a whiskey sour and flew right back, said that the government had no money with which to pay writers for scripts for the program “KEEP ’EM ROLLING”13 and that all talent and writing services were being donated. So I said that was all very well to ask Mr. Norman Corwin14 who makes a couple of thousand or so a week or more to donate a script—but that Negro writers made no such sums from radio, nor seldom if ever had commercial bids—though they wrote like Bernard Shaw, and that it would take a week out of my life to do what he requested; and that furthermore Negroes were never asked to write anything except when a segregated all-Negro program was coming up. Anyhow, I agreed to do it—since he thought it would help win the war—and God knows we better win it before Hitler gets over here to aid in the lynchings! So I posted him Saturday an eight page script called BROTHERS written to his and Mr. Bernard Schoenfeld’s specifications to suit the actors they have in mind—Rex Ingram and Canada Lee—and designed to aid in building civilian morale by presenting (and solving in favor of national unity) some of the problems troubling the minds of Negroes today in relation to the war, ending up with a strong argument as to why we must all get together and beat the pants off Hitler. I hope they will like it.15
I also sent them a copy of mine and Margaret Bonds’ song, THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS, which is most suitable to a Lincoln Birthday program. Tomorrow I am seeing Eric Bernays16 regarding a recording of this song along with our AMERICA’S YOUNG BLACK JOE on the other side. And Robins about publishing it.
I am anxious to know who is in charge of the “KEEP ’EM ROLLING” program here in New York, so that I might confer with them regarding these things.
Also is there any chance of getting a PAYING script to do—since the government seems to think I write well enough to help build civilian morale? Lemme know.
Best to you, Max,
Sincerely,
Langston Hughes
TO NOËL SULLIVAN [TLS]
Yaddo,17
Saratoga Springs, N. Y.,
August 5, 1942.
Dear Noël,
Here I am at Yaddo, the old Trask-Peabody seven-hundred acre estate with rose gardens, rock gardens, fountains, statues, two lakes, and a couple of dozen studios scattered about in the woods. But only ONE dog on the whole place—a little cocker spaniel named Brownie.
My studio is way way back in the woods and so surrounded by trees and vines that you can’t see anything inside even in the morning without turning on the lights. Someone must’ve told them I like to work at night so I think they must be trying to provide the atmosphere. There is a rule that nobody can visit anybody else’s studio—in fact, not even walk down their path—so there is plenty of peace and quiet. (I hope not too much for creative well-being.) But at least—and at last—I’m getting a letter or two written!
I found Nathaniel Dett18 here and he spoke of once having stopped at your place, but regretted not having met you at the time. There are none others of the Race. But a most beautiful Chinese girl, a Miss Kuo,19 arrived this morning. Besides Dett only one person I’ve met before is here, a Polish refugee writer I’d known in Madrid slightly, but whose name I can’t spell. Carson McCullers is here.20 And Kenneth Fearing.21 And Leonard Ehrlich who wrote the novel about John Brown, GOD’S ANGRY MAN.22 But most of the others are names unknown to me—a young poet from Denver who used to play in a college jazz band and so enlivens the very stately music room every night by beating it out on the grand piano; a couple of handsome Mediterranean-looking boys who paint Picasso-like pictures with the eye at one corner of the canvas and the mouth at the other upside down; a lady short-story writer; a Czech composer; a couple of literary essayists; and a few husbands and wives. Everybody is most congenial and it looks as though it is going to be fun. I’m here for six weeks, until September 10, so I’ll write you more later.
New York has made me mighty near as thin |as| Ramon23—who, by the way, is in New York, but I didn’t see him. The last few days there were most hectic, what with the MARCH OF TIME24 using my song on their program and the publicity, interviews, and excitement on the part of the publishers who are rushing to get the music out and orchestrations made. Since Kenneth Spencer introduced the number, I think his picture is going to be on it. (He’s leaving for SHOW BOAT in St. Louis this week, then on to the coast for CABIN IN THE SKY in the films.)25 The colored army band in Harlem is making a 70 piece orchestration to play in parades, the Treasury Star Parade26 has made a transcription for the air, and this Saturday it will be sung at the big Navy Relief Program. So it looks like FREEDOM ROAD might just maybe catch on—and make my fare back to the coast for me. (HOPE SO.)
Another song my Aunt and Uncle and I wrote, THAT EAGLE,27 I think will be in the new Stage Door Canteen show—where I am now a bus boy every Sunday night. The Canteen is really a wonderful place—what the USO Centers ought to be. Fania |Marinoff| and others on the board have insisted that there be no color line—and there isn’t. Soldiers and sailors of all the United Nations—black and white—come and eat and dance and get along fine—not even a fight so far in all the months they’ve been running. Jane, Walter White’s daughter, Dorothy Peterson, and others act as hostesses—Blanche Dunn, too.
Give my best to Lee |Crowe| and tell him to write me once in a blue moon. And to Marie |Short| my love—and a letter soon. (Now that I have peace and quiet once again.) After song-writing, it’s wonderful!… … Affectionately,
Langston
<P. S.—(over)>
P.S. I didn’t know I was to be on the MARCH OF TIME program until the morning of the broadcast—and it being Thursday I wasn’t sure you’d be at the Farm, so sent a wire to either you or Eulah |Pharr| so she could phone you in town in case you’d have liked to listen in.…. Is there a Bach Festival this summer, or has the War affected that, as it has so much in the East?.… By the way, lightning struck the Stadium shell the other day and tore it up. Fortunately, it was a couple of hours before a concert, so only one person was hurt. Have you had any news directly from Roland?28 I very much hope he will no longer live in Georgia. The papers have centered so much interest on him recently—and I hear one wealthy Boston white lady flew down to see the family after the incident—and a number of reporters, I think, went. So I’m afraid the local residents will not be pleased with all that and—sub-normal as they <are>—further physical harm might result.
The position of Negro troops training in the South—many Northern boys who have never been used to such severe and irrational Jim Crow—is very dangerous, so soldiers returning on furloughs say. It seems the lower Southern elements resent colored boys in uniform and so go out of their way often to be rude and unpleasant. This added to the Jim Crow cars and lack of service in diners send the Negro boys back North much madder at the South than they should be at Hitler. Some of the Negro papers are requesting a removal of all colored training units from the South. But it seems to me that would be bad, too, in that it would be an admission on the part of the Government and our War Department that they cannot protect our soldiers in certain parts of our own country. On the other hand, should a major racial clash suddenly break out somewhere down there, look how bad that would be for morale and international relations, too. Just one more complexity to worry about in this troubled world, isn’t it?
Did you see Pegler’s column on the Negro a few of weeks ago?29
Two or three magazines have asked me for articles on ourselves and the war, but so far the song, FREEDOM ROAD, is the best I could do. We all want to beat Hitler and we all want to march down Freedom Road. But that road will have to run past Roland’s farm, too. Else it won’t really be going anywhere—for anybody.
L.
Yaddo,
Sunday.
Arna, ole man,
Your review in the HERALD TRIBUNE is swell! Everybody up here has read it.…. Did I tell you THE SEVENTH CROSS is a |Maxim| Lieber book?30 Half the authors up here this summer were his, including |Carson| McCullers, who don’t get on with him,,,,,Leonard Ehrlich got his call for a physical. Those who’ve read parts of his new novel say it is swell. He’s been working on it for years, and says he just needs two more months. That’s what he said when I first came two months ago, but he still needs two more now. (Which I understand so well.)….. Zell Ingram writes from Camp way down in West Texas where he has been sent to train to fight Paratroopers..And a dismal prairie it must be, too. My next door neighbor in New York and college mate was sent to Mississippi. Soon as I get my call I’m going to write all the commanders and boards there |who| are howling about the lack of respect for the uniform in the South—and that I don’t approve! Thought I would just howl about general army segregation on the first paper, and take up segments <i>n later communications. Also probably do a couple of articles in between.…. COMMON GROUND took my article on WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SOUTH. Seems like most of the next issue is devoted to the subject.…. According to this poem enclosed, Jim Crow is on his last legs. But I neglect to say those legs are STRONG. Well, you can’t put everything in a poem! That is why I also write prose books once in a while. I would be writing one now if I did not stop so often to write poems and songs and letters, etc.…. Say, can I get a Chicago lecture around November 20-21? I have one in St. Louis just preceding. But need a couple more out that way to make it really pay. HELP ME!…… Your friend and admirer,
L. Hughes
IMPORTANT P. S. (Kindly read)
Never did hear from Bush at Good Shepherd |Community Center| about the play, but with my questionnaire and all, and everybody going in the army making a play very hard to cast, probably better not consider our trying to stage (or at least my trying to stage) ST. LOUIS WOMAN this fall in Chicago.31 It would need a lot of people, besides Harvey isn’t around to help on the technical end. Heard from him at some Mo. camp way down by Arkansas. Dismal, too, from all I could gather, but I imagine Hitler would put us 
in sorrier camps than that if he ever got over here. And the guards would be crackers!
634 St. Nicholas Avenue,
New York, New York,32
November 15, 1942.
Dear Marie,
Looks like if I keep waiting for a chance to write you a long letter, I’ll never write any, but I think of you often, and the kids, and wish I could see you-all. In fact, I had expected to come on out that way following my lecture tour this fall—which <is> beginning this coming week in St. Louis—but the draft board says I have to report for induction in January. They gave me a sixty-day deferment since the tour was already mostly booked when I was classified 1-A a couple of weeks ago. Otherwise, I would have been called this past Wednesday. They’re working fast these days, trying to clear out their files, I guess, for the 18 year olds. Almost all my friends are in already, or on the verge of going.
I had a delightful summer at Yaddo, but didn’t get very far on my book. Wrote a lot of poems, though, and several new songs, and various articles. Did I remember you to say once you’d read Carson McCullers’ books? She’s still at Yaddo, and is a swell kid, very southern with a drawl, but strange and interesting, and I think a swell writer. Kenneth Fearing was my next door neighbor and a nice guy, too.
They have a wonderful cook at Yaddo, a Hungarian countess or something, I believe, anyway a charming and cultured lady who can cook like two French chefs. When I left, she said, “So, you are going back to Kentucky?” Which amused me no end. It seems that in Buda Pesh she’d always connected colored folks with the song, My Old Kentucky Home! Poor lady, she has not heard from her children since Hitler took over her country.
When I see you I will tell you some very funny stories about Yaddo.
Haven’t had a chance to see Elsie |Arden| or Connie here in New York. Had just a week to see the draft board, finish two songs for a picture (I hope) and pack up and get off. Had to do all my booking and letter writing myself this year as everybody that type<s> a line in the East is employed in Washington.
Tell Noël |Sullivan| about my draft status, will you? And that I will write him soon since I won’t be able to come on out there as I’d hoped in time for that Thanksgiving or Christmas turkey. But maybe they will send me to Fort Ord. That would be fun!.…. The papers say Saroyan33 is there. I ran into him one night last summer at Cafe Society.34
Tell Kraig and Erik those cards they sent me last Christmas were adorable and I’ve still got them and look at them every so often. Ask Kraig how she likes “MR. FIVE BY FIVE”. I do.35
I’ve written a song you will boo! To be moaned and crooned—MY HEART IS A LONE RANGER with music by Irving Landau of Radio City Music Hall. But I hope Bing Crosby will moan and croon it. You’ll like THAT EAGLE, though, the song I had in the Canteen Show, a folk style number about how that mighty bird spreads his wings over you and me.
Tell Bill and John hello when you write.
I felt lousy and sad when I started to write this letter, but writing to you and thinking of you makes me feel better, because I think you are just about one of the swellest persons in the world.
Tell Lee |Crowe| Hy! Tell him Jimmy Daniels is in the army, Tampa, Florida.
See by the papers where the Roland Hayes biography is out.36 Well reviewed.
Had a very nice letter from Sis about her new baby. Haven’t had a chance to answer it yet.
Here’s a V for Victory! Let’s hurry up and win this here war!
Sincerely,
Langston
COPY—NOT FOR PUBLICATION
<Also sent to Arna |Bontemps|
Walter |White|
Yale>
634 St. Nicholas Avenue,
New York, New York,
March 18, 1943.
Mr. Carl Van Doren,37
Red Cross War Fund,
Authors’ Division,
41 Central Park West,
New York, New York.
Dear Carl Van Doren,
I have your letter of March 12 in regard to the Red Cross War Fund. As a fellow author I am sure you will understand what I am going to say. When we write, putting down on paper our truest and our best thoughts, we write out of the heart, don’t we? Well, I know in my mind that the American Red Cross is a vital and important institution, but in my heart, every time I think about it, I have a sinking feeling.
You know, of course, that I am a Negro. Perhaps you have read in my book, THE BIG SEA, about the summer of 1927 that I spent in the deep South, the summer of the great Mississippi flood. I shall never forget the disgraceful treatment on the part of the Red Cross of the Negro flood refugees in Mississippi which I have described in my book. For further light on this, read William Alexander Percy’s LANTERNS ON THE LEVEE38 where additional unpleasant facts come through, even from the pen of a dyed in the wool Southerner, as was Mr. Percy.
Of course, you know about the outrageous segregation of Negro blood and Negro blood donors in the present Red Cross blood bank set-up. Even the Hearst JOURNAL-AMERICAN in last Sunday’s issue devoted a full page to showing how there is no scientific basis at all for distinguishing between bloods of any race and that it could make no possible difference to a wounded soldier whose blood was poured into his veins.39
You probably know further how the Red Cross has carried Dixie patterns of segregation abroad in its setting up of Jim Crow Red Cross Clubs for Negro troops in lands where segregation has hitherto not been the rule. Hitler could hardly desire more. General Douglas MacArthur may be right when he says, “The Red Cross never fails a soldier.” Certainly it has failed thirteen million Negroes on the home front, and its racial policies are a blow in the face to American Negro morale.
Sincerely yours,
Langston Hughes
4/17/43
Dear Arna,
Fate has overtaken me with a heavy foot again. I added up my bank book the other day and found out I had mighty near minus zero. And then when the income tax man told that, not being married and having no dependents, I would have to pay $126.00 tax, I mighty nigh fainted. However, I recovered enough to go home and figure that thing all up again, percentages and all by myself, and got it down to a more sensible figure. But still one that left me ruined and broke in both spirit and finance. So I reckon I can’t buy any show tickets for us in advance. And I also reckon I’d better write myself half a hundred lecture letters AT ONCE and prepare to hit the road heavy this spring. (Always something to keep a writer from writing!) Chicago was cancelled. Said they’<d> recently had Horace.40 (One Negro a season being enough, I guess. See how the color line hits the lecture business!) But I had already booked Wayne University at Detroit, so have to come out that way anyhow now. Know of any contacts in Evanston or round abouts?
Did you hear the Muni broadcast?41 I didn’t, at least not very well, being right there in the studio. Sound and singers being on different mikes, you couldn’t tell how it sounded as a whole. But it got some good notices in the press next day, so I guess it was O.K. Muni, I thought, read it beautifully.
Did I tell you ALL my plays, a whole suitcase full, disappeared out of the basement? No use for poor folks to try to keep anything! Well, they are all up at Yale, anyhow, for posterity to worry about producing. Personally, I don’t much care. And certainly I’ve written my last free bit of entertainment. Turned down two chances to do free scripts since the broadcasts. Folk know what I can do now. If they want ME to write for them, dig up some dough. Nobody else connected with radio or theatre works for nothing. Why should they expect the author to do so? Huh? The technicians don’t, nor the directors, nor the studio executives. I WON’T NEITHER. Hell with ’em!
One more free lecture appearance in the offing—and that is ALL there. With Rackham Holt at a Carver Memorial on April 6th at Columbia University.42 You’ll probably be here at that time.
Did I tell you |I| met Wendell Willkie at Walter’s the other night?43 Swell guy.
Sincerely,
Lang
<Saw Saroyan’s “Human Comedy” last night and like it very much.>
<Call up and see if Lou’s baby is here yet.44 Tell her my brother’s wife (no. 2) is also expectant. Send them both your pamphlet, please!>
Yaddo,
Saratoga Springs,
New York,
July 23, 1943.
Dear Countee,
I am back at Yaddo for the summer. Came to the city for the week-end, dropped by the Y but Claude |McKay| was out, and failed to get by your house, so maybe we can make a few plans about our proposed book by mail45—advance details, at any rate, and then when I’m next in town, around mid-August, if you and Claude are there, we can get together for discussion.
I brought up with me all my poems—several hundred—and will make a selection of hitherto unpublished in book form ones for our volume. If you all think wise, I’ll stick to lyric and poetic kind of poetry and exclude the folk forms this time. The two don’t mix very well, and blues and such would probably throw the whole book out of key.
My proposal is this: That each of us submit our poems to the other two for elimination. In other words, you and I would look over Claude’s selection and suggest which ones are not up to his best standards, and which we would advise including. Claude and I would do the same for yours. And you and Claude would act as jury on mine. Then from the lot left intact, we <each> would arrange a sequence for a section of a book. How does that strike you?
I suppose the book would be in three sections, perhaps alphabetical in order:
Next thing is to think of a good title. You and Claude start thinking.
As I remember, Claude had some very beautiful sonnets he once sent back from Europe to |Alain| Locke that I’ve never seen in print anywhere. I hope he still has them on hand. Ask him. And if convenient, kindly show him this letter and get his reactions to these proposals. If you like the two man jury idea, I could post my poetry down to you anytime, and you two could initial the ones that you like best and think should be in the volume, then while I’m up here where it is quiet and there’s time for work, if you’d send them back, I could make a sequence arrangement for the book and bring it down around the 15th when I come. We could then meet and possibly tentatively put the book together. Let me know?
There’s a pleasant group here this summer: Agnes Smedley,46 Margaret Walker,47 Rebecca Pitts,48 Karin Michaëlis,49 and seven others.
Best regard to your wife. As ever,
Sincerely,
Langston
Yaddo,
Saratoga Springs,
New York,
July 29, 1943.
Miss Katherine Seymour,
Writers’ War Board,
122 East 42nd Street,
New York City, N. Y.
Dear Miss Seymour,
I am very sorry to have been so long in answering your letter. I phoned you last Wednesday in New York, but you had not come in. On my return to Yaddo, I found myself with a couple of urgent deadlines to meet, and still have a week or so of rush writing to do to catch up. Just today have I been able to give a little quiet thought to the problems of the UNITY AT HOME—VICTORY ABROAD broadcasts of which both you and Mayor LaGuardia have written me.
As I see it (from a Negro viewpoint) there would be two general ways of approaching the material:
1. That of positive achievement, such as the several recent broadcasts on the life of Dr. Carver were; such as those concerning Negro war heroes like Dorie Miller50 might be.
2. Or the problem approach setting forth the difficulties of the Jim Crow military set-up, segregation in war industries, etc., and what people of good will might do about it.
Radio has been in the past fairly receptive to the first approach but has (at least in my experience) insistently censored out any real dramatic approach to the actual problems of the Negro people. In that regard it has been almost as bad as Hollywood. Radio commentators have been allowed considerable leeway, but not the dramatic script writer. And certainly Negroes have not liked most of the “handkerchief head” sketches in which Ethel Waters and other colored stars have been featured.
Just as soon as I can complete a promised article, now due, for an anthology of contemporary Negro opinion about to go to press, I will prepare two or three synopses and send you.51 Should the Board like any of them, I’d be happy to work them out in more detail. For the musical programs, I have a number of songs (for which I’ve done the lyrics) that might be of use—like FREEDOM ROAD which was on the MARCH OF TIME and the TREASURY STAR PARADE. But there are others, new ones, never on the air, and I shall secure them for you. I will write you again soon.
Sincerely yours,
<8/5/43>
Dear Arna,
There is nothing like farewells to bring forth parties and dinners. If you and Alberta were in New York I would give one for you myself …… You know I am sorry I missed the riots.52 It has always been my fate never to be in one. I think I will go down to New York this weekend maybe though and survey the damage. The better class Negroes are all mad at the low class ones for disturbing their peace. I gather the mob was most uncouth—and Sugar Hill is shamed!53
Thanks for all the interesting clippings. There’s an article of mine in the current Canadian magazine THE NEW WORLD with a big picture spread of colored celebs.
Rain, rain, rain here at Yaddo. I got to read poetry to the kids on vacation here tonight. Agnes Smedley “organized” it. She’s been working out classes and programs for them. She didn’t use up all her energy in China.
I am so sorry to hear about Horace |Cayton|’s mother. I hadn’t heard before.
You got a good point about the train column.54 What do you think of this one enclosed?
I reckon I lost my watch in the riots. I left it at Herbert’s opposite the Theresa to be cleaned—and they tell me the place was cleaned out!
Lots of Harlem glamour girls up here vacationing say they had their fur coats in “storage” (nee pawn shops) for the summer. And they were all cleaned out, too. So they reckon they will be cold next winter. I expect that is one of the reasons Sugar Hill is so mad. Laundries and pawn shops looted, they suffered almost as much as the white folks.
I do not know why that tickles me, and I am sorry in my soul.
Dear sweet POPO! I will certainly need that $35.00.
NEW DAY A-COMIN’ says Mr. Roi Ottley. NEW NIGHT would probably be better.55 (How sweetly optimistic is the cullud race!)
Kappo Phelan, cousin of Noël Sullivan’s, is here. She writes NEW YORKER style stories and humorous poetry. Morton Zabel56 arrives today.
I’ve picked out all my lyrics for the Cullen-McKay-Hughes book they’ve proposed. Nothing of race, just beauty. Has not that been known to soothe the savage beast? (Did I tell you, Claude is in Harlem Hospital—stroke?) Lang
WRITERS DINE OUT:
Carson McCullers and I were entertained at dinner Sunday by Mr. Jimmy Elliott, leading colored barman here. He had champagne and chicken for us. Good, too!
634 St. Nicholas Avenue,
New York, 30, New York,
December 21, 1943.
Dear Rayford,57
Naturally, I do not agree with Mr. Couch in regard to your book, or my own article therein, at all! I am appalled at the fact that the head of a distinguished university press can hold an attitude like that expressed in his comment regarding the Roland Hayes incident:58 “Mr. Hayes with his background ought to have been amused (and careful not to show it) at the prejudices of the salesman, troubled over the label put on his race, and careful to do exactly what the blackest Negro entering the shop might have been expected to do.”
I am afraid the southern intellectuals are in a pretty sorry boat. Certainly they are crowding Hitler for elbow room.
I do not know whether you want to release this correspondence to the press, but if you do, I could make use of portions of it in my Chicago Defender column.59 Kindly let me know.
Certainly I trust you will find another publisher for the book.60 And soon! Happy New Year to you!
Sincerely yours,
Langston Hughes
June 28, 1944.
Mrs. Blanche Knopf,
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
501 Madison Avenue,
New York City.
Dear Blanche,
Thank you for your letter of June 22nd. I am, of course, happy that my first five books will be back on the old basis without any payment from me. I am accordingly signing a copy of Mr. Lesser’s letter dated June 21st reinstating my contracts for THE WEARY BLUES, FINE CLOTHES TO THE JEW, NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER, THE WAYS OF WHITE FOLKS, and THE DREAM KEEPER as of May 1, 1944, which I enclose with this letter. It is my understanding now that all rights in the above property are my sole and absolute property, subject, of course, to the reinstated contracts.
It seems to me this will make things much simpler should I ever have a Selected or Collected Poems, a complete collection of my short stories, or continue NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER into a trilogy.
At any rate, it worried me—as I signed Mr. Lesser’s letter when I was in the hospital under sulfa drugs—which make a person dopey anyhow—and his letter had come in response to a totally different request—which was an advance on royalties to be earned, since the BIG SEA had just appeared, and I believe (or rather know, according to the date on galley proofs) SHAKESPEARE IN HARLEM had already gone to the printers.61
I posted to you the other day a list of the eight blues from our books as set to music by Herbert Kingsley, which Decca Records proposes to record and publish as songs. I also sent the list to Mr. William Downer at Decca, asking him to get in touch with you. As a member of ASCAP and SPA my song contracts must conform with their regulations. Decca’s has taken twelve songs in all, four not in my books.
Again with my thanks to you, and all good wishes,
Sincerely yours,
Langston Hughes
July 1, 1944
Mr. Alan Green
Writers’ War Board
122 East 42 Street
New York, 17, N. Y.
My dear Mr. Green:
Concerning “JUMP LIVELY JEFF”, I think the reason most Negro readers would not like the book is because it seems to perpetuate almost all of the old stereotypes that have been used for many years to caricature the Negro people.62
The first two words of the first chapter are enough to make Negroes dislike it; naming a little colored boy after a rebel general, Jefferson Davis. Then comes persimmons and very shortly thereafter watermelon, and then an old Aunt Car’line. This particular fruit, and many varieties of Aunties have been used lo these many years to make Negroes a funny picture race. Then you turn a few more pages and lo and behold there is a Mammy. Most Negroes nowadays loathe Mammy.
Since all of the conversation is in very broad dialect, and most Negro youngsters now who have been to school speak the same kind of English as other children, they naturally do not like slavery-time comic, antiquated dialect. These young people wish that books were written about colored children which would make them somewhere near the normal American pattern.
I do not have time at the moment to read this book for the story as I am about to go to St. Louis, Chicago and Detroit, to act as Emcee for the American Negro Music Festivals in those cities. Perhaps the story may be a good one, but from a modern American Negro viewpoint there are so many unfortunate surface nuisances, so many comic strip names like Abslinoun, and so many pappys’ and mammys’ and aunties’, plus the dialect that one only has to glance through the book to see why Colored people to-day would not like it. It would seem to me the kind of book that would encourage perfectly nice little white children to mistakenly address a perfectly nice little Colored child in broad dialect, under the impression that that is the language Colored people speak now.
I am sorry that I cannot read the book carefully nor comment on its plot or story value at this time, but I think that someone could see by simply glancing through it, why it would hardly be a book to offer American Negro children. I personally am not a children’s author or a literary critic. The leading <Negro> writer of children’s book is Mr. Arna Bontemps, Librarian, Fisk University, Nashville, 8, Tennessee. Perhaps Mr. Bontemps could give Miss Darby a much more comprehensive criticism than I. I am returning the book to you, herewith.
Sincerely yours,
Langston Hughes
L
HUGHES
d
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[On Langston Hughes, 634 St. Nicholas Avenue, New York 30, New York stationery]
December 8, 1944
Dear Arna,
Too bad you-all aren’t here this week-end—Loren and Juanita63 are, also Jose Antonio Fernandez de Castro and his wife of Havana (THE authority on Negro literature down there) just back from an air-plane trip around the world in Cuban diplomatic service, also Mrs. Browning of STORY MAGAZINE, and Charley Leonard of Hollywood—so I am having a cocktail party Sunday for all and sundry. Dorothy |Peterson| is also going ahead with her buffet supper tomorrow night. But no doubt things will be jumping equally but differently when you do arrive! I’ve sold some of your theatre tickets to Ralph Ellison and Fanny.64 But will try to get you some more.
I’ve been head over heels in things to do—opera libretto to revise, some urgent articles to get done, etc. etc. so haven’t been able to rummage through all my stuff to look for that statement for Crates, but will send him copies of all the wonderful letters that came in from the various high schools I’ve been lately, several in response to a troubled principal in Bridgeport who wrote everyone after the Sokolsky attack to see what I had said, also had the FBI in attendance, who evidently gave me a clearance, as his assembly was held.65 The whole business made me a bit sore at folks who strain at a gnat and daily swallow all the camels of discrimination we have to put up with year in and year out. My personal feeling is TO HELL WITH THEM! I do not care whether they like me or my poems or not. They certain<ly> do us as a race very little good—Christian though they may be.
Your article on the two Harlems is very very good indeed! I think it is just about your most beautiful and effective piece of writing and, if widely read, should provoke a lot of discussion. I just about bet it will choke all these people with moral fishbones stuck in their throats!
Harlem writers have been invited to a press conference with Sec. of State Stettinius tonight.66 Shall go see what it is all about.
Congratulations on the show contract! Hope it comes off and makes a big hit so you make some BIG money.…. Barney Josephson sent for me again to work on the proposed Cafe Society Revue. Says they definitely will start on it after New Year’s with money up and all. Seems Oscar Hammerstein II is interested.
So, I leave you now to consider the stack of mail on top of mail piled on the bed. I cannot take my rest until I unpile some of it.
Sincerely, Langston
January 11, 1945
Dear Miss Treadwell:
Thanks very much indeed for the very nice poem which you wrote about me and which you were so kind to send me. You must forgive me for not answering your letters more often but I have been almost continuously out of town on lecture trips until the holidays, and tomorrow I leave for Boston, then shortly to the Middle West and South, to be away for several weeks. So you see how difficult it is for me to keep up with my mail.
I send you my very good wishes for a happy and successful New Year, and may you continue to write.
Sincerely yours,
Langston Hughes
Miss Maggie Treadwell
1014 Lombard Street
Wilmington, Delaware
P.S. This letter was dictated January 7, 1945. Meanwhile, your other letter came. Certainly, I am greatly complimented by your high regard for me. But, look here! You mustn’t have too much affection for persons you don’t know! It is hard enough to work out a smooth romance with someone you are near, let alone somebody away off.…. You know, I receive dozens of letters like yours. I suppose everyone in public life does. I think I explained to you once that it is not physically possible to keep up a correspondence with one-tenth of the people who write, as the mail box is full of mail every day, and to answer them all regularly would mean doing nothing else in life but writing letters—which is not possible for a writer who also must earn a living. So you will understand if I do not answer your letters. At this time of year I am on the road lecturing most of the time, anyhow, and often do not see my mail for weeks. In a few days I head for Illinois, Michigan, then Alabama, and Georgia.…. Best wishes to you,
L. H.
March 16, 1945
Dear Mercer:67
I shall be very much interested in receiving Jacques Roumain’s new book and, if we can find a publisher for it before hand, I would be happy to assist in the translation, providing you will do the rough draft, as you say you will. When I receive my copy I think I shall allow the Knopf office to read it and see if they would be interested in it. Unfortunately, I understand from publishers that Latin American books have not sold very well here, and that now most of the publishing houses are averse to accepting new ones. I know some of the Latin American writers that I have met here in New York, and who are quite famous in their own country, complain bitterly about not being |able| to get their work published here. Some years ago when I translated some thirty short stories by Mexican writers, I was able to place only three.
One of the larger publishing houses asked me the other day if I would be willing to do another children’s book for them about Haiti. In case I were to do that, and in case we are able to secure a publisher for Jacques’ novel, it might not be a bad idea if I were to come down to Haiti for a couple of months this summer, particularly since I would like to write about present day Haiti in the children’s book, and about other phases of Haitian life than that of the peasantry. If I were to come down, we could complete the translation of the novel then. In any case, I would not be able to even start on it before summer, as I am leaving New York again in a couple of weeks for an eight-weeks tour of Louisiana and Texas and will not be back in New York again until June.
I have been out of town so much this winter that I have not even had a chance to work on the poem which I started in honor of Jacques Roumain.68 When I do have a chance to finish it, I shall send it to you for possible translation and publication in Haiti. I ran into your mother a few weeks ago on 125th Street and she looked fine. She “balled” me out for not having answered your letters, for which I do not blame her, but I am sure you know, if you have ever been on a lecture tour, that it is hard to find time to even wash your face let alone write letters, particularly when you are lecturing for colored people. Our race seems to have a special fondness for lecturers. Certainly they entertain us lavishly and feed us well, but they do not leave time for combing the hair.
With very best wishes to you, I am
Sincerely yours,
Langston Hughes
Dr. Mercer Cook
United States Embassy
Port au Prince, Haiti
TO NOËL SULLIVAN [TLS]
[On Langston Hughes, 634 Nicholas Avenue, New York 30, New York stationery]
June 26, 1945.
Dear Noël,
Maybe it is because I got up at six this morning and went to mass at Our Lady of Lourdes—or maybe it is just because I got an early start—that I find myself writing some long delayed letters to friends I have been thinking of a long time. I don’t believe I ever wrote you how much I enjoyed the several lovely little Christmas cards that accompanied my present. And my birthday gift must have been blessed because it has been fuller than any purse I have ever had up to date. I carried it with me on my recent long tour of the South—from which I have just returned. And since this has been the best tour I have had in years, I find myself at long last able to pay off some of the—in fact just about ALL of the little debts that accumulated during my mother’s illness—or my own in California. (By the way, did I tell you that I offered to buy back the book rights I sold Knopf that time for Four Hundred Dollars, but they gave them back to me? Arthur Spingarn showed me the kind of legal-like letter to write.)….. You remember you lent me $150.00 when I was in the hospital? Well, a mere check doesn’t mean a thing, and I can’t begin to repay you for that or the million other wonderful and helpful things you’ve done for me, but anyhow, here that one particular check is, with all my gratitude. Certainly it was a great help to me at the time.…. I really had a very pleasant tour with travel much better this winter than last, and trains not as crowded. I made most of my reservations in New York before I left, and didn’t have any real inconveniences at all. I flew from New Orleans out to Texas—San Antonio, and on up to Dallas. I found school kids going to classes by plane out there. A few years more and I expect they will be as common as cars.…. Pullman and diner car service is better for colored people than before, but still far from ideal. The Supreme Court decision caused thousands of new colored voters to register, or seek to register, and some communities resorted to rather childishly amusing run-a-rounds, such as hiding the registration books, or locking the door when Negroes came!69 One town in Alabama registered two hundred colored voters, but after that simply told the others to go on back home, that enough had signed up for one year! And they didn’t intend to let any more vote this time!…… Democracy comes hard to the South, but it slowly, slowly seems to be coming. Texas, which is half Western, half Southern, probably will have lots of brawls along with the birth pains, as both the Negroes and the white folks are mean down there.…. Well, I am trying to get my agency to book me through to the Coast in the fall so I can spend a part of the winter with you-all on the farm. (Mississippi has me for Negro History Week already, and a Mormon University in Utah in January, so the pattern isn’t straightened out yet, but somehow I hope and intend to get to California, and back to my little house again.)….. Give my love to Lee |Crowe|, and Marie |Short|, and all. I shall write Marie tomorrow.…. Enjoyed that card from you and Edna. Did you get to the San Francisco Conference?70 It’s good they chose your city.
Affectionately,
Langston
[On Langston Hughes, 634 St. Nicholas Avenue, New York 30, New York stationery]
November 14, 1945.
Dear Arna,
I never was so glad to get back to New York before in my life! The Middle West raw, cold, and prejudiced, trains crowded and smokey and travel the worst I’ve seen it so far, soldiers going home and mad, and an air like pre-cyclone weather in Kansas used to feel with open and under-cover gusts of fascism blowing through forlorn streets in towns where desperate little groups of interracial Negroes and whites are struggling to keep things half way decent.…. Charles S. |Johnson|71 was at the Grand as usual (he ought to buy the joint) but seemed as sleepy and tired as I was, although we had a good visit.…. Me, I caught a bad cold mid way the tour, and only pulled through because I know the old routine by heart. Cold seemed to disappear the minute I got back to Penn Station!.…. Your HERALD TRIBUNE piece looked swell.…. Horace |Cayton| was in New York so I didn’t see him.…. Had dinner with the NEGRO DIGEST Johnsons72 who have a big Packard, FINE apartment in house they have bought, over-crowded office so they’re looking for a new and better one, business booming!.…. Got a ten dollar raise from my paper. Under threat of retiring altogether. They want you and Mrs. Bethune.…. Thanks for TOMORROW.73 Reckon I forgot to tell you Marion74 gave me a copy just before I left.… Did you EVER get your records? They swear they were finally sent!.…. I wish I had known w<h>ere Paul |Bontemps| was since I was nearby in Massillon. (Got your letter after I got back here yesterday.) I certainly would have called him.…. I guess PHYLON is using the piece as they had wired DEFENDER for permission to reprint some column or other with it.…. Do you not recall that Simple did go to Chicago once and spoke of how dark the bars are there?….. Stop spelling Dr. Du Bois with an e, BOISE it is not! Did you see all the mistakes in name-spelling in Ben Richardson’s note preceding his piece on me in his new book?75 How can cullud be so careless?….. A darling old lady of eighty tottered up to me at the Oak Park 20th Century Women’s Club and told me all about how her family had been active in the Underground Railway in Ohio in the old days, and how she remembered one slave they had saved at risk of their lives by holding off the slavers with rifles. “But,” she said, “don’t you know, he wasn’t worth saving! He had the nicest little wife, and he just beat her all the time!”….. Which probably is what helped to give me the cold. I never had thought before that escaped slaves were other than heroic and noble! Had you?…… Had a nice note from Marion in Ocala, Florida—Zora |Neale Hurston|’s country …… YOU are telling me about the theatre!?!?.… HUH?….. I have bought two fine suits with the STREET SCENE check and intend to see some fine shows, and it do not worry my mind!76 I have wished Mr. Stokowski77 well on his South American honeymoon, and the American Negro Theatre which was to have opened with my JOY TO MY SOUL but have now put it last for spring, do not worry my mind neither.78 Cullud, white, amateur, professional—all same—nothing ever as is swore will be! SKYLOFT in Chi split in two groups—each with big posters out all over town about their coming season. Bob Lucas won their contest with a very good war play in one act that I helped judge.…. Front of Theresa is all scorched like top of Empire State Building. Beautiful lady who jumped out window nude was well known matron from up Yonkers way in bed with playboy when their mat<t>ress caught on fire. They say she could have escaped in hall but couldn’t find her clothes, so she jumped to her death instead. Too much modesty does not make sense in cases of emergency like that! 
The playboy just walked on down the hall as he was!.… I gave THEY SEEK A CITY a plug in several of my talks when I speak of urban conditions and trials and tribulations.…. Josh White79 is using my CRAZY HAT song at Cafe Society. Golden Gates80 plan to record it soon, I hear …… You had better stop reviewing all those books and get down to your WORK. (I am just mad because I can’t even read anything, let alone review it.) I had to turn down doing a piece for the Christmas issue CHICAGO SUN.…. I am getting a new said-to-be-very-good secretary (half day every day till I go to Coast in January) starting this week—fellow who is studying for MA at NYU.…. My agreement for Atlanta next fall, half year, came through at rate I told you.…. I find a whole basket of full of books here on my return—including two of Horace’s big volumes which look most imposing.81 …… CARMEN and ANNA both are making a mint of money in Chicago, so the road is not a bad idea for both your shows long about now.82 Another road company of ANNA as well as a London one are said to be casting. Looks like all actors will work for a while, which is good.…. Now if Negro playwrights can just get started!.…. Give my best to Alberta and tell her maybe I will get by that way sometime during the winter. I’m booked for Mississippi in mid-February. I don’t know yet which college that December War Bond rally will take Mark Van Doren and I to.83 Wish it would be yours.
Sincerely,
Langston
November 24, 1945
Dear Max:
I have your note regarding the introduction to the Whitman book.84 I am sending someone to the library today to look up the necessary additional material for me, and will try to add this to the introduction on Monday, and send it to you. God forbid that I should ever attempt such a job again since it is so much easier and simpler to make up things out of my own head!
The Negro Digest Publishing Company of Chicago has just written me that they wish to publish my “Simple Minded Friend” columns in a paper bound book to sell for 50¢. I personally like this idea very much and will type and arrange the columns for them shortly. The Editor writes: “We are definitely interested in publishing your ‘Simple’ stories in a pocket-book size, and can meet you with your percentage allowed in such cases. Please send us copies of the ‘Simple’ stories and have your agent send us the necessary contract and blanks to be signed.”
Could you attend to this matter for me and see if we can get an advance of $100 from them? The Chicago Defender, where these columns first appeared, has only the rights to weekly newspaper publication, and no control over my other rights. The Negro Digest wishes to have the book illustrated by Ollie Harrington.85
Sincerely yours,
Mr. Maxim Lieber
489 Fifth Avenue
New York 22, New York
1 Practically broke, Hughes reached Chicago on November 20. Friends there came to his aid. Arna Bontemps arranged for him to stay at no charge at the Good Shepherd Community Center, while Arna’s wife, Alberta, offered to feed him. The Rosenwald Fund, from which Hughes had received a $1,500 fellowship in June to work on a series of plays about black heroes, lent him an office at its headquarters. Hughes was there when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States went to war. He left Chicago on December 16 to stay with the Harpers in New York before returning to Chicago in mid-February 1942. He remained there until late April.
2 Hughes’s mother died of cancer.
3 The actor Canada Lee, born Lionel Cornelius Canegata (1907–1952), had starred as Bigger Thomas in Orson Welles’s Broadway staging of Native Son. During Hughes’s stay in Chicago, Hughes and Bontemps collaborated on a special “Bill of Rights Salute to Freedom” show. Lee read their script on black achievement to an audience that included soldiers, sailors, and the governor of Illinois.
4 The agricultural scientist George Washington Carver (c. 1864–1943) of Tuskegee Institute created hundreds of food products from peanuts, sweet potatoes, and other native Southern plants. He was widely recognized for his contributions to the economy of the region.
5 That December, Hughes spoke against racism to a youth group in Chicago from the KAM Temple of Rabbi Jacob Weinstein, whom he had met previously in California. A sociologist, Horace R. Cayton, Jr. (1903–1970), and his wife, Irma, ran the Good Shepherd Community Center in Chicago, known as “the world’s largest Negro settlement house.”
6 Charlotte E. Carr (1890–1956) was the director of Hull House from 1937 to 1943, during which time she encouraged the organization to address the needs of African Americans.
7 Possibly a Japanese American employed by Noël Sullivan.
8 In his book Be Angry at the Sun (1941), Robinson Jeffers argued against American involvement in World War II.
9 Apparently a reference to a Selective Service letter received by someone Hughes and Sullivan knew.
10 George Ficke, a pianist, was a friend of Noël Sullivan and a member of the Carmel community.
11 As part of his Rosenwald Fund fellowship project, Hughes wrote The Sun Do Move, a play based on one of the most storied sermons in the black religious tradition. The play tells the story of Rock, a slave who is sold away from his wife and son. The Skyloft Players, a drama group Hughes founded in 1941 at the Good Shepherd Community Center, launched The Sun Do Move before an enthusiastic house on April 24, 1942. The play ran twice a week through May.
12 Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, hosted a weekly radio program called Of Men and Books, which was broadcast nationally by CBS.
13 Keep ’Em Rolling was a radio series organized by the Office of Civilian Defense to boost public morale. Hughes agreed to write a script for a program celebrating the birthday of President Lincoln. Following guidelines from the screenwriter Bernard Schoenfeld (1907–1990?), Hughes wrote an eight-page script called “Brothers,” with parts intended for actors Rex Ingram and Canada Lee. “Brothers” tells the story of a black soldier returning home from duty in a convoy.
14 Norman Corwin (1910–2011) was a highly successful writer and director of radio drama during the 1930s and 1940s.
15 In “Brothers,” Hughes wrote boldly about racial segregation and explicitly applied the much discussed “Four Freedoms” recently identified by President Roosevelt to the issue. The Office of Civilian Defense rejected “Brothers” as being too controversial for airing.
16 Eric Bernays (1894–1949) owned a midtown Manhattan record store and an independent record label, Keynote. As the business manager of The New Masses, he had played a key role in organizing a successful show on black music called “From Spirituals to Swing” at Carnegie Hall a few years earlier. Also involved in left-wing politics, he produced Talking Union, a recording by the Almanac Singers in 1941.
17 Yaddo is an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, founded in 1900 by the financier Spencer Trask (1844–1909) and his wife, Katrina Trask (1853–1922), a poet. Hughes, Yaddo’s first black writer, arrived on August 4 and stayed for three and a half months.
18 The black musicologist R. Nathaniel Dett (1882–1943) was director of music at Hampton Institute in Virginia from 1913 to 1931. He led its renowned choir on tours of the United States and Europe.
19 Helena G. C. Kuo (1911–1999) was a Chinese journalist and writer who had moved to the United States in 1939. She published her first book, Peach Path (London: Methuen), in 1940.
20 The Southern writer Carson McCullers (1917–1967) became Hughes’s best friend at Yaddo. Her acclaimed first book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter appeared from Houghton Mifflin in 1940.
21 The American writer Kenneth Fearing (1902–1961) published several collections of poetry including Angel Arms (1929) and Afternoon of a Pawnbroker (1943), as well as seven novels.
22 Leonard Ehrlich (1905–1984) was the author of God’s Angry Man (Simon & Schuster, 1932), about the radical abolitionist John Brown.
23 Hughes met the actor Ramón Novarro (1899–1968) in San Francisco in May 1932 when the two men were houseguests of Noël Sullivan.
24 The March of Time was a radio series broadcast on CBS from 1931 to 1945. When Hughes’s song “Freedom Road” aired, he took part in the broadcast and endorsed the war.
25 Kenneth Spencer first performed the song “Freedom Road” during a program at Café Society in New York. He played a supporting role in the film Cabin in the Sky (1943) and a leading role in the acclaimed 1946 Broadway revival of Show Boat.
26 The Treasury Star Parade was the U.S. Treasury Department’s thrice-weekly radio program that promoted the sale of war bonds. Hughes’s song “Freedom Road,” cowritten with his “uncle” Emerson Harper, had also aired on this program.
27 Hughes collaborated with Toy and Emerson Harper on the song “That Eagle of the U.S.A.” It was first performed by the African American actor Rosetta LeNoire (1911–2002) at the Stage Door Canteen in New York.
28 In an incident widely reported, a white clerk had beaten the internationally known concert singer Roland Hayes during a dispute in a shoe store in Georgia. Hughes wrote a poem, “Roland Hayes Beaten,” about the episode.
29 James Westbrook Pegler (1894–1969) was an influential columnist in the 1930s and early 1940s. His syndicated article “The White Press Is Fair to Negroes” appeared in many papers across the country in mid-June.
30 The Seventh Cross is a novel by the German author Anna Seghers (1900–1983). An English translation by James Galton was published in 1942.
31 The Skyloft Players did not perform St. Louis Woman.
32 After Yaddo, Hughes went back to New York City. On November 18, he left on a lecture tour, which included several engagements before military audiences. He returned in early December when summoned by the draft board.
33 William Saroyan (1908–1981), a prolific American playwright and fiction writer, was born in Fresno, California, the setting of many of his stories.
34 Café Society was a New York nightclub opened by Barney Josephson at Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village in 1938 to highlight African American performers. A second club, which became known as Café Society Uptown, was founded in 1940 on Fifty-eighth Street.
35 Erik and Kraig were Marie Short’s two youngest children. “Mr. Five by Five” was a popular song in 1942 written by Don Raye and Gene de Paul. The inspiration came from Jimmy Rushing, a featured vocalist with Count Basie’s orchestra from 1935 to 1948. Rushing was said to be “five foot tall and five foot wide.”
36 MacKinley Helm’s biography, Angel Mo’ and Her Son, Roland Hayes, was published by Little, Brown in 1942.
37 Carl Van Doren (1885–1950) was editor of Century magazine. In 1939 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography Benjamin Franklin. On March 12, in his role as chairman of the Authors’ Division of the Red Cross War Fund, he sent a form letter addressed to “Dear Fellow Author” asking Hughes for a donation. (Apparently, Van Doren did not reply to Hughes’s indignant letter.)
38 William Alexander Percy (1885–1942) wrote Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (Knopf, 1942).
39 Hughes’s poem “Red Cross” also addresses the question of racially segregated blood. It reads: “The Angel of Mercy’s / Got her wings in the mud, / And all because of / Negro blood.”
40 Presumably the sociologist Horace Cayton.
41 On March 15, 1943, accompanied by the gospel singing of the Golden Gate Quartet, the veteran actor Paul Muni (1895–1967) read Hughes’s long poem “Freedom’s Plow” over the national NBC Blue Network.
42 Rackham Holt was the pen name of Margaret Saunders Holt (1899–1963), who wrote George Washington Carver: An American Biography (Doubleday, Doran, 1943).
43 Wendell Willkie (1892–1944) was the Republican Party candidate for president in 1940. He had attended a gathering at the home of Walter White of the NAACP.
44 “Lou” is Hughes’s long-time friend Louise Thompson Patterson, the wife of William L. Patterson.
45 The proposed volume by these three aging lions of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes, Cullen, and McKay, was to be (Hughes wrote) “a kind of reaffirmation that we are still here and strong and nobody has surpassed us.” But McKay died, and the volume never appeared.
46 The radical author and journalist Agnes Smedley (1892–1950), known for her sympathetic accounts of the Chinese Revolution, wrote the semiautobiographical novel Daughter of Earth (1929).
47 Later known as Margaret Walker Alexander, Margaret Walker (1915–1998) first met Hughes while she was in high school. Her best-known works are Jubilee, her 1966 novel about slavery in America, and her pamphlet of verse For My People, which was chosen for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1942.
48 Rebecca E. Pitts (1905–1983) was an educator, activist, and editor, as well as author of the posthumously published Brief Authority: Fragments of One Woman’s Testament (Vantage Press, 1985).
49 Karin Michaëlis (1872–1950), a Danish novelist and short story writer, was the author of a series of children’s books. Her most famous novel was translated as The Dangerous Age: Letters and Fragments from a Woman’s Diary (London: John Lane, 1912).
50 Doris “Dorie” Miller (1919–1943), a black cook on the USS West Virginia, was awarded the Navy Cross (then the third highest honor for valor awarded by the Navy) for his actions during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. After helping to move his mortally wounded captain to a safer location, Miller manned a machine gun despite a lack of combat training and fired for several minutes at attacking planes. The West Virginia sank but Miller survived to become, in the black press especially, a prime symbol of the absurdity of segregation in the U.S. armed forces. In December 1943 he was killed in action on a ship in the Pacific.
51 In August, Hughes sent Seymour a draft of In the Service of My Country, a radio script for use in her broadcast. It aired on September 8 over WNYC. A companion piece, “Private Jim Crow,” was never used.
52 On August 1, 1943, a riot broke out in Harlem after a black soldier was charged with attacking a white policeman who was arresting a black woman named Margie Polite in a hotel. Rumors spread that the police had killed a black soldier who was trying to protect his mother. The New York Times reported that five persons were killed and about five hundred injured during the disturbances. Several hundred were arrested and property damage was estimated at $5 million. Hughes’s sardonic poem “The Ballad of Margie Polite” was inspired by the incident that started the riot.
53 Sugar Hill is a traditionally upper-income section of Harlem that includes Edgecombe Avenue, where individuals such as Walter White, James Weldon Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois lived at one time or another.
54 On August 3, 1943, Bontemps had written to Hughes offering suggestions to improve Hughes’s column “On Missing a Train.”
55 In his book New World A-Coming: Inside Black America (1943), the journalist Roi Ottley (1906–1960) discussed the history, problems, and hopes of African Americans.
56 Morton Dauwen Zabel (1901–1964), a scholar of English and European literature, was associate editor of Poetry magazine from 1928 to 1936, and editor from 1936 to 1937.
57 The Howard University historian Rayford W. Logan (1897–1982) edited What the Negro Wants (1944), a book of fourteen essays by prominent blacks about race relations in the contemporary United States. Hughes contributed “My America” to the volume. Other essayists included Mary McLeod Bethune, A. Philip Randolph, and W. E. B. Du Bois. All opposed segregation. At first a supporter of the project, W. T. Couch of the University of North Carolina Press balked (at times in questionable language) at publishing the book after he read the essays. On December 21 Hughes wrote to Couch: “We, too, are citizens, soldiers, human beings—and we certainly don’t like Jim Crow cars! Would you?”
58 See Hughes’s letter of August 5, 1942, to Noël Sullivan.
59 Hughes’s column From Here to Yonder first appeared in The Chicago Defender in November 1942. In 1943, he introduced the character Jesse B. Semple, or “Simple,” a comic, urban black Everyman who became for many readers the best feature of the column.
60 Couch published Logan’s book in 1944 but provided a reactionary preface to the volume.
61 In February 1941, Hughes had received a letter from Joseph C. Lesser, a Knopf employee, in response to his request for a loan of $400. Lesser proposed that instead of lending Hughes $400, Knopf would pay him the same sum “in lieu of all future royalties” from his five books with the firm. With sales of these books weak, and Hughes in dire need of cash, he agreed to the terms but with misgivings. Later, advised by his lawyer, Arthur Spingarn, he approached Knopf about recovering his copyrights. Although he offered to buy back his rights, Knopf returned them without charge.
62 The Missouri writer Ada Claire Darby (1884–1953), author of Jump Lively, Jeff (1942), was known in the 1930s and 1940s for her historical novels for younger readers.
63 Loren Miller (1903–1967), an attorney and civil rights activist from Los Angeles, had traveled with Hughes to the Soviet Union as part of the Black and White film group in 1932; Juanita was his wife.
64 Befriended by Hughes in 1936 on moving to New York City, the Oklahoma-born Ralph Waldo Ellison (1913–1994) committed himself in 1937 to writing. In 1953, he won the National Book Award for his novel Invisible Man (1952). Ellison married Fanny McConnell in 1946. Hughes had known her since at least 1938, when she directed a Chicago staging of Don’t You Want to Be Free?
65 George Sokolsky (1893–1962) was a conservative syndicated columnist for the New York Sun and other papers. In his October 23, 1944, column, he attacked Hughes for his allegedly communist views.
66 Edward Reilly Stettinius, Jr. (1900–1949), was secretary of state from December 1, 1944, to June 27, 1945. In 1945, he attended the Yalta Conference with President Roosevelt. Later he served as chairman of the United States delegation to the conference in San Francisco that led to the founding of the United Nations.
67 Mercer Cook (1903–1987) was a Howard University professor of French and, in the 1960s, U.S. ambassador to the African republics of Niger, Senegal, and Gambia. Cook was teaching at the University of Haiti in 1944, the year Jacques Roumain died. When he approached Hughes with an invitation from Roumain’s widow to translate into English his posthumously published novel Gouverneurs de la Rosée, Hughes agreed to do so after Cook offered to provide him with a first draft. The firm of Reynal and Hitchcock published their translation, Masters of the Dew, in 1947.
68 The actor Canada Lee read Hughes’s “Poem for Jacques Roumain” at a memorial for Roumain in New York in May 1945.
69 The U.S. Supreme Court decision Smith v. Allwright (1944) overthrew a Texas state law that in effect allowed the state Democratic Party to bar blacks from primary elections.
70 The United Nations Conference on International Organization (UNCIO) convened in San Francisco from April 25 to June 26, 1945. At the closing session, delegates from fifty countries signed the charter for the United Nations.
71 In Chicago, Hughes had met Charles S. Johnson, a professor at Fisk and codirector of the Julius Rosenwald Fund race relations program.
72 John H. Johnson (1918–2005) began publishing the magazine Negro Digest in 1942. The periodical, modeled on the nationally popular Reader’s Digest, continued until 1951. In 1945, his company started the even more successful Ebony magazine.
73 Tomorrow published a section of They Seek a City, a 1945 volume by Arna Bontemps and leftist writer Jack Conroy (1899–1990) on black migration to Chicago. It was partially funded by the Illinois Writers’ Project. The men also collaborated on a juvenile book, The Fast-Sooner Hound (1942). Conroy’s semi-autobiographical novel about the son of a coal miner growing up during the Depression, The Disinherited (1933), received critical acclaim.
74 In 1940, photographer Marion Palfi (1907–1978) emigrated from Europe to the United States and settled in New York City, where she met Hughes in the course of developing an interest as a photographer in civil rights issues. In 1946, she received a grant from the Rosenwald Fund to spend three years documenting the impact of Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination on everyday people in the South.
75 Ben Richardson’s Great American Negroes (1945).
76 Hughes received advance money to work as the lyricist on Street Scene, an opera based on Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama of the same name (1929). With a libretto by Rice (1892–1967); song lyrics by Hughes and, eventually, Rice; and music by the German-born composer Kurt Weill (1900–1950), the opera opened on Broadway in January 1947. The production was a critical and commercial success.
77 Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977), a renowned conductor, declared his interest in staging Troubled Island, Hughes’s opera with William Grant Still, if $30,000 could be raised to fund the project. Only $2,000 was raised.
78 Hughes’s Joy to My Soul: A Farce Comedy in Three Acts was first presented by the Gilpin Players of Karamu House, Cleveland, on April 1, 1937.
79 Josh White (1914–1969) was an African American gospel, folk, and blues singer, a songwriter, and a political activist. His fame grew in the 1930s, when he was said to be a close friend of President Roosevelt.
80 The Golden Gate Quartet, an African American gospel singing group, had accompanied actor Paul Muni in the March 15, 1943, NBC radio broadcast of Hughes’s Freedom Plow.
81 St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr.’s Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (about Chicago) was originally published in 1945 in two volumes.
82 The musical Carmen Jones, a modernization by Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen for an African American cast, was first staged on Broadway in 1943. Anna Lucasta by Philip Yordan (1914–2003), also written for an all-black cast, was produced on Broadway in 1944. Both were important vehicles at that time for black performers.
83 The poet Mark Van Doren (1894–1972) served on the executive board of the leftist Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions.
84 Hughes wrote the introduction, “The Ceaseless Rings of Walt Whitman,” for I Hear the People Singing: Selected Poems of Walt Whitman (International Publishers, 1946).
85 Oliver Harrington (1912–1995) was a well-known black cartoonist and political satirist. His most popular cartoon character was Bootsie, whom Harrington described as “a jolly, rather well-fed but soulful character.” Nothing came of the plan mentioned here.