Chapter 24 - Langston Hughes and the Black Arts Movement

Summary

Langston Hughes was a crucial “midwife” of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. On a very practical level Hughes generously promoted, encouraged, published, and supportively criticized many of the younger (and not so young) Black artists who initiated Black Arts. He also provided a model of a Black poet and playwright who connected to a national grassroots African American audience in multiple ways, including regular reading tours, especially in the South and by publishing in the popular Black press. Finally, Hughes was a key progenitor of an aesthetic connecting Black literature, both poetry and fiction, to a continuum of Black music that was both an index and a shaper of Black consciousness, Black experience, and Black feeling that played an essential role in the growth of Black Arts poetics. In turn, the early Black Arts Movement had a marked impact on Hughes’s late work