Understanding Langston Hughes

James Langston Hughes was born February 1902 in Joplin Missouri and his whole childhood he spent trying to escape the racism found in the United States. His mother was the one to raise him and instill a great passion for racial pride which can be seen greatly in the poems, stories, and plays he has written. In one of the poems in the book The Dream Keeper called When Sue Wears Red was written when he was in his Ohio high school just starting his collection of writings. Through out his life he came very educated and used his everyday life along with the stories his mother and grandmother told him about the times of harsh slavery to help him create his beautifully illustrated poems. He is know as one of the founders of the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance and was an inspiration to many black writer then by the 1980s he was being reappraised and was newly appreciated as a significant voice of African-Americans. He died May 22, 1967 after cancer complications and his ashes lay in under the middle of the foyer in the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.