Selected Letters of Langston Hughes: Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel

April 28, 1963

Dear Nancy:

Such a wonderful letter from you! Bringing back so many old memories.…. Henry’s book,¹ your marvelous NEGRO (listed at $60.00 last time I saw a mention of it in an old Rare Books catalogue), your lovely poems are all in sight as I write<,> on my studio bookshelves.…. One of Pickens’ grandsons² turned out to be a very brillian<t> (and handsome) young man, top mathematician or something, with a high paid job although still quite young …… Arthur Spingarn, at 86, is heading for Greenwood, Mississippi (where all the current voting trouble and riots are) next week—to prove he is with the Freedom Riders and other kids—one of whom he met at my house last night who was just out of jail down there for teaching a voters registration class. (Negroes have to learn to read the whole constitution—and even then they’ve registered only 10 in the past six months!)

I’m so sorry to hear you’re ill, so don’t use up precious strength answering this, or acknowledging books. (My short stories ordered sent you, and POEMS FROM BLACK AFRICA will be on its way soon. But needn’t write.) Just send me a line about mid-July to the: c/o American Express, Paris, as I hope to be there by the Quatorze Juillet day.³ But maybe can only stay a couple of weeks, as it looks now as if my Theatre Guild play will be going into rehearsals (at last) in August. But do let me know where <you> might be found at mid-summer—and if I can come and say Hello, I will.

Affectionately,
Langston

TO JIMMY DAVIS [TL]

April 28, 1964

Dear Jimmy: ⁶

I’m saving stamps, I reckon. BLACK NATIVITY closed on the road owing me $10,000 back royalties and TV fees. (So am suing).⁷ My column syndicate got behind $600, so have taken my column back from them, and it is now running only in New York POST which I can handle myself.⁸ JERICHO-JIM CROW ran in hole while Stella Holt was in Hawaii setting up theatre project for Ford Foundation.⁹ But she is now back and almost has deficit wiped out, although it closed Sunday, but is still doing outside church and lodge engagements, so I stand a chance to get back sums due there. And Rible Blakey and partner are negotiating to bring it to Paris in the fall. So I may get over your way then. Am invited to a writers conference, anyhow, in Europe in September, expenses paid …… Over here the white folks are wondering what to do with the Negroes. CORE pretty well tied up the Worlds Fair on opening day—even tried to sit-in on top of the Orange Ball atop the Florida pavilion¹⁰.…. Mr. |Emerson| Harper had a double hernia operation but is out and doing O. K. Mrs. |Toy| Harper getting older and crosser by the minute, and her sight no longer very good.…. I’m recently back from a program in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, and a few days in Puerto Rico. I had to return to lecture platform, having lost $$$$$ on TAMBOURINES which was a $125,000 flop on Broadway, due to management fights. Cast behaved beautifully, only white folks fighting like cats and dogs. Last week of run, show had no ads, no management. And we missed the Ed Sullivan show on weekend the President died. So this is my bad-luck-in-theatre season. LIFE took a big spread on JERICHO, but held it up to combine with the James Baldwin BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE—which postponed its opening till this week. Meanwhile JERICHO closes, so our photos may never appear!!!.…. Naturally, I am OFF the theatre for all time! Back to poetry!

Talked to Jobe |Huntley| on |the| phone last night. He’s reducing—and taking time off to do it.

My secretary says he has got to go to NYU where he’s getting his MA in TV this spring, so I’ll end this epistle and let him mail it off. Answer to your note.

You may be gone, but not forgotten!

Drink Vin Postillon!

Sincerely,

TO ARNA BONTEMPS [TLS]

[On 20 East 127th Street, New York 35, N.Y. stationery]

July 17, 1964

Dear Arna: I see where you’re scheduled for the Asilomar Conference at Monterey.¹² The run down looks interesting. (I wonder if Baldwin will show—or Horace |Cayton| who used to be like Baldwin is now—easily lost). Will you and Alberta drive to the Coast? Do you still have relatives out there? If my most amusing friend, Marie Short, were in Carmel, I’d give you a note to her. But she’s not been well recently, and is sort of in a rest home in San Francisco. Hollow Hills Farm is now some sort of church center, I believe, non-Catholic.

Johnny Davis finally got me!¹³ I’ve promised him the manuscript next week. Just when I start working good two girl cousins are descending upon me Monday from Chicago for the Fair. And several of Mrs. Harper’s relatives are arriving from Los Angeles later in the week. I need a tree house in Kenya!

“Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”

“Life for me ain’t been no crystal

“Life for me ain’t been no

Life for me ain’t been”

Life for me ain’t” Lang

Life for me”

Life for”

Life””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””¹⁴

“

TO BOBB HAMILTON [TL]

COPY

(Langston Hughes to Bobb Hamilton)¹⁵

January 18, 1965

Dear Bobb:

Thanks a lot for sending me a copy of your letter to the POST re my column on LeRoi Jones—whose talent and position will hardly be harmed by a bit of controversy. In fact, I hope it helps box office.…. Pardon my putting this paper in crooked. It’s now 3 A.M. and I’ve spent the evening reading through some hundred or so letters from white cabbies who are MADDER about my TAXI column¹⁶ than you are about LeRoi’s—who won’t, I believe, be mad at all. He knows I like the bulk of his work very much. I loved DUTCHMAN (and said so in the POST) and have frequently expressed my admiration for his talent in print, on the air, and elsewhere. But I don’t like the current plays at St. Mark’s, and see no harm in saying so, do you?¹⁷ Just as you or LeRoi have a perfect right to dislike (and say so) any writing of mine. (By the way, I didn’t see the review of a “booklet” of mine you mention, but I’ll phone LeRoi and see if he can tell me where to find it)….. In my long years of writing, I’ve found that adverse (and particularly controversial) comment which arouses discussion, does more GOOD than harm. I’ve been called since the Twenties everything from a “sewer dweller” (Negro press) to a “Communist traitor” (white press). Result: book sales grew, lecture audiences increased, folks wanted to see for themselves what the excitement was all about. So I hope my comments won’t hurt LeRoi. I’d like to see him become (if not an O’Neill success-wise—to which you object) at least a Shaw or an O’Casey or Brecht—or just a great big Jones in marquee lights. And more power to you, too, for so frankly expressing your opinions. It would be a sad day if the young writers all agreed with the old. Best ever,

Sincerely,
(SIGNED)
Langston Hughes

¹ Nancy Cunard published a book of music by her African American companion Henry Crowder, entitled Henry-Music (Hours Press, 1930).

² Cunard included three essays by William Pickens in her Negro: An Anthology (1934): “The American Congo: The Burning of Henry Lowry”; “The Roman Holiday”; and “Aftermath of a Lynching.”

³ Quatorze Juillet or July 14, is Bastille Day in France, celebrated to mark the French Revolution of 1789. On July 2, 1963, Hughes left for Paris. He spent two months abroad.

⁴ Later that year, 1964, the American boxer Cassius Marcellus Clay (b. 1942) changed his name to Muhammad Ali after converting to membership in the Nation of Islam. Clay loved to employ humorous rhymes in his public remarks; hence Hughes’s use of doggerel here.

⁵ Along with this note, Hughes probably sent Clay an inscribed copy of the 1963 revised edition of his and Milton Meltzer’s A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, which was first published in 1956. Hughes acted shortly after Clay beat Sonny Liston in a shocking upset on February 25, 1964, to become the heavyweight champion of the world.

⁶ Jimmy Davis, a Juilliard-trained American pianist then living in Paris, was a close friend and frequent correspondent of Hughes.

⁷ In a settlement, the producers of Black Nativity paid Hughes $6,900.

⁸ With The Chicago Defender way behind in paying him, and seeking to cut his salary, Hughes jumped at the chance in 1962 to move the column to the mainstream New York Post. The Post, at that time a liberal newspaper, paid more and reached a much wider audience. He later returned as a columnist to the Defender.

⁹ Jericho-Jim Crow, Hughes’s gospel musical about the civil rights movement, opened at the Greenwich Mews Theatre on January 12, 1964. It closed in late April that year.

¹⁰ Supporters of the civil rights organization Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and other groups picketed the opening of the 1964 World’s Fair in New York to protest as demeaning to blacks the staging of a minstrel-styled satire against bigotry.

¹¹ In 1964, Hughes was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Literature degree by Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve) in Cleveland, Ohio. He had received honorary degrees from Lincoln University (1943) and Howard University (1960).

¹² The 1964 Negro Writers Conference held on the Asilomar Conference Grounds in August brought together in California several African American and white writers and critics from across the United States. Horace Cayton, then a professor at the University of California–Berkeley was an organizer of the event.

¹³ John Preston Davis (1905–1973), a lawyer and civil rights activist, founded Our World magazine in 1946. In 1964 he produced the substantial American Negro Reference Book with a grant from the Phelps-Stokes Fund. Hughes contributed an essay, “The Negro and American Entertainment,” to the volume. Davis had been one of the writers published in Fire!! (1926).

¹⁴ Hughes is riffing on his popular poem “Mother to Son,” which first appeared in 1922 in The Crisis.

¹⁵ Early in 1965, the cultural nationalist Bobb Hamilton (1928–?) became one of the cofounders of Soulbook: The Revolutionary Journal of the Black World, based in Berkeley, California.

¹⁶ Hughes’s controversial column “Taxi, Anyone,” about taxi drivers in New York who refused to pick up black customers, appeared in the New York Post on January 8, 1965.

¹⁷ LeRoi Jones’s one-act plays The Toilet and The Slave opened at St. Mark’s Playhouse on December 13, 1964. Hughes’s column “That Boy LeRoi” appeared in the Post on January 15, 1965. The Toilet is set in the lavatory of a boys’ school. It opens with a black boy using one of the seven urinals and ends with the battered head of a white boy in another. Time magazine called the plays “spasms of fury” aimed vengefully at whites, and reflective of Jones’s “venomous intensity.”

¹⁸ Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little (1925–1965), the charismatic Nation of Islam minister and a radical champion of the ideals of black dignity and power, was assassinated by gunmen at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965.

¹⁹ After Hughes met a young policeman, Sunday Osuya, during his trip to Nigeria for the inauguration of Azikiwe, the two men became friends and exchanged several letters. Osuya was sent to the Congo as a peacekeeper. Eventually Hughes would name Osuya as one of his beneficiaries in his last will and testament.

²⁰ Classically trained, the baritone Gilbert Price (1942–1991) toured with Harry Belafonte and the Leonard de Paur chorus and also performed in two off-Broadway shows prior to appearing in Jericho-Jim Crow.

²¹ The African American actress Claudia McNeil (1917–1993) won praise for her performance in Hughes’s Simply Heavenly. In 1961, with limited stage experience, she had emerged as a star on Broadway in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.

²² This song, recorded as “See-Line Woman” on Nina Simone’s album Broadway-Blues-Ballads (Verve, 1964), was written by Simone and George Houston Bass. Nina Simone was the stage name of Eunice Kathleen Waymon (1933–2003).

²³ To avoid distractions as he worked, Hughes sometimes took a room at the Wellington Hotel on Seventh Avenue at 55th Street in mid-Manhattan.

²⁴ Cicely Tyson (b. 1933), an accomplished actress of the stage and screen, grew up in Harlem.

²⁵ William Melvin Kelley (b. 1937) published his third novel, A Drop of Patience, in 1965.

²⁶ Melvin B. Tolson’s Harlem Gallery (Twayne, 1965) is a complex, erudite poem of twenty-four cantos (one for each letter of the Greek alphabet).

²⁷ Hughes’s play The Prodigal Son shared a billing at the Greenwich Mews Theatre with The Exception and the Rule, Bertolt Brecht’s Marxist drama about a merchant and his servant.

²⁸ Hughes collaborated with the folksinger and actor Harry Belafonte on Belafonte’s The Strollin’ Twenties, a television variety show set in Harlem in the 1920s. Sammy Davis, Jr., Diahann Carroll, Duke Ellington, and Sidney Poitier also starred in the show.

²⁹ Hughes wrote the text of “Let Us Remember,” a cantata with music by David Amram (b. 1930) commissioned for the biennial meeting in 1965 of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. According to Amram, Hughes calmed one rabbi’s fears about his ability to convey Jewish feeling by asserting that he had a Jewish grandfather. Actually, Hughes mentioned elsewhere that he had a Jewish great-grandfather. The noted mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel (1900–1973) was the principal soloist, and Edward G. Robinson, a Hollywood star, the narrator.