By Victor Trammell

Photo credits: Winold Reiss (c. 1925) / National Portrait Gallery

Langston Hughes (pictured) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist.

He was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that “the Negro was in vogue,” which was later paraphrased as “when Harlem was in vogue.”

Growing up in a series of Midwestern towns, Hughes became a prolific writer at an early age. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career. He graduated from high school in Cleveland, Ohio, and soon began studies at Columbia University in New York City. However, he later dropped out of college.

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Nonetheless, Hughes gained notice from a number of New York publishers. First, he was published in The Crisis magazine and then by other book publishers. He became well-known inside the creative community in Harlem. He eventually graduated from Lincoln University.

In addition to poetry, Hughes wrote plays and short stories. He also published several non-fiction works. From 1942 to 1962, as the civil rights movement was gaining traction, he wrote an in-depth weekly column in a leading black newspaper called The Chicago Defender.

On May 22, 1967, Hughes died in the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City at the age of 66. His cause of death was due to the complications he had after having abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer.

His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. It is the entrance to an auditorium named for him. The design on the floor is an African cosmogram entitled Rivers. The title is taken from his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers“.

Within the center of the cosmogram is the line: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Source: Your Black History: Happy Birthday to Poet Langston Hughes