Happy Birthday Langston Hughes
Date and Time
Feb 1, 2023 9:00 am
Location
Brookland
625 Monroe St NE, Washington, District of Columbia, 20017
Feb 1, 2023 9:00 am
Brookland
James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry.
Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes. As he wrote in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,â€
“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.â€
Busboys and Poets is named in honor of Langston Hughes who worked as a busboy at Washington DC’s Wardman Park hotel in the 1920s prior to gaining recognition as a poet.Â
