Hughes Langston - Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond by Langston Hughes edited

Robin D.G. Kelley

Langston Hughes has become a household name. An icon of the Harlem Renaissance, the subject of numerous biographies, and one of the bona fide deans of African American letters, Hughes may be the best-known American poet after Robert Frost or Walt Whitman. But to characterize Letters from Langston as simply another epistolary window into the life and times of the Black Bard would be both a mistake and a grave injustice to the entire enterprise. Letters from Langston is a book of correspondence between five extraordinary people who sustained an extraordinary friendship during extraordinary timeslovingly and painstakingly reconstructed by Evelyn Louise Crawford and MaryLouise Patterson, who were, in more ways than one, the offspring of these relationships.

Careful readers of Hughess biography will be familiar with Louise Thompson, the brilliant organizer, writer, and orator who became Langstons closest confidante. In her capacity as secretary of the Harlem chapter of the Friends of the Soviet Union, Louise led a large delegation of Black artists to the Soviet Union in 1932 to participate in a film about racial conditions in America. Though the film was aborted, she was thereafter dubbed Madame Moscow. Many readers will also recognize the name of William L. Patterson, Louises husband and one of the United States highest-ranking Black Communists. Pat, as he was called by his friends, is perhaps best known for authoring We Charge Genocide, a searing indictment of American racism, published in 1951. Matt and Evelyn Nebby Crawford are perhaps less known, but they are no less significant. Matt gave up a promising career as a doctor to become a full-time organizer as a labor leader, a Communist, and a fighter for racial justice. His wife, Nebby, never joined the party, but she did support struggles for racial and economic justice in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they lived, and she remained an avid, intelligent interlocutor within her circle of radical friends until her untimely death in 1972.

The Pattersons and the Crawfords were nothing like the working-class folk characters one finds in Hughess poetryexcept for their chronic financial struggles, and that was by choice. Each family had been poised to lead a comfortable, middle-class existencebounded by Jim Crow laws, of course. They had everything: education, professional contacts and experience, and loads of opportunities. At some point in their respective lives, each stood in the eye of the cultural tornado we now call the Harlem Renaissance. Their circle of friends included W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul and Essie Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, and others. Louise, Pat, Matt, and Nebby were fine writers, excellent orators, and voracious readers, never bound by the limits of their community, race, or country. They could have become renowned scholars or mainstream Negro leaders. Instead, they independently chose to cast their fate with what would become the most despised movement in America: Communism.

Why? Because they believed that, through relentless global struggle, another world was possibleone that was free of class exploitation, racism, patriarchy, poverty, and injustice. They thought that an international socialist movement offered one of many possible paths to a liberated future. Through reading Marx and Engels and Lenin, they began to see the wretched of the earth with new eyes. As members of what Du Bois called the talented tenththe educated elite presumably destined to lead the raceLouise, Pat, Matt, and Nebby were renegades from a class known for its contempt of the Black poor. The main task of the Black middle class during the first half of the twentieth century was to uplift their race, prove to white folks that their education, manners, and good behavior made them worthy of citizenship, and avoid the pale faces that populated the lynch mobs and enjoyed the rights and privileges associated with the color of their skin. But the four chose instead to empathize with the plight of all Americans, including new European immigrants, Jews, and working-class whites, from whose lips the word nigger flowed easily. They shared their vision of multiracial proletarian unity with Langston Hughes, whose 1935 poem Let America Be America Again expressed, in bold cadences, their common dream to rise Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death/The rape and rot of graft and to redeem/The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers./The mountains and the endless plain... And make America again! The letters in this book constitute a powerful and indisputable reminder of that vision and Hughess dedication to it, and of his Black radical comrades, who helped sustain that vision in spite of decades of police and FBI harassment, intimidation, violence, internal political dissension and intrigue, endless meetings, constant travel, and, in Pats case, imprisonment. Their letters reveal a shared worldview and a passionate political dedication to humanity.