DREAM KEEPER—Album with Pamphlet featuring readings by The Author—LANGSTON HUGHES

The Negro Speaks of Rivers I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathe in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln         went down to New Orleans,* and I've seen its muddy         bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. *Lincoln's determination to end slavery was said to have started when, as a young man, he visited New Orleans for the first time. Langston Hughes is often referred to as the "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race." He was born in Joplin, Missouri February 1, 1902. He grew up in Lawrence Kansas and Lincoln, Illinois before going to high school in Cleveland, Ohio, and spending a year in Mexico near Mexico City. In all of these places he was a part of a small, sometimes tiny community of Blacks, to whom he was nevertheless profoundly attached from early in his life. Langston Hughes was descended from a distinguished family. His maternal grandmother's first husband had died at Harpers's Ferry fighting in John Brown's band; her second husband, Langston's maternal grandfather, had been prominent in Kansas politics during Reconstruction, before racism drove him from the field; and his brother, John Mercer Langston, had been one of the most famous Black Americans of the nineteenth century, a congressman from Virginia and the founding head of the law school of Howard University. However, his mother, Carrie Langston Hughes, and his father James N. Hughes, separated shortly after his birth. His father emigrated to Mexico, where he was successful in business, while Langston grew up near poverty and lonely in Lawrence, Kansas. Langston went to New York in September 1921 to attend Columbia University, although he later claimed that he really went there to see Harlem. The previous June he had published what many consider to be one if his greatest poems, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, which he dedicated to W.E.B. DuBois, in the Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Langston did well at Columbia University but never really felt comfortable there and only stayed for one year. Langston took on a series of odd jobs. Among them was a stint as a mess boy on a ship that enabled him to see the world, including Africa and Europe. He continued to write poems, like Dream Variations with images and sentiments ("Night coming on tenderly/ Black like me") that endeared him to a wide range of African Americans. His early influences as a mature poet were Walt Whitman and Carl Sandberg ("my guiding star"). But Claude McKay was for him the embodiment of the cosmopolitan and racially confident and committed Black poet he aspired to be. And he was also indebted to older figures such as DuBois and James Weldon Johnson, both of whom admired his work and aided him. He fused into his poetry blues and jazz themes. However, his evocation of lower-class Black culture drew criticism from critics in Black newspapers and magazines. He responded to them through a salient essay published in Nation entitled The Negro and the Racial Mountain. "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame," he had declared. "We know we are beautiful. And ugly too." This essay quickly became a manifesto for many of the younger writers who wished to assert their right to explore and exploit allegedly degraded aspests of Black life. With most of these writers Hughes enjoyed a warm relationship; his modesty was matched by habits of generosity that endeared him to others. In 1926 Hughes returned to college, this time at the historically Black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1929. Unlike most of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, hughes's carrer easily survived the end of that movement; there was never a year, or even a month or week, when he did not produce art in keeping with his sense of himself as a thoroughly professional writer. In 1943, in his weekly column for the Chicago Defender he introduced one of his enduring fictional triumphs, the character of Jesse B. Semple, or Simple, a Harlem everyman whose comic manner hardly obscured some of the serious themes raised by Hughes in relating Simple's exploits. By the end (1967) of his life Hughes was almost everwhere recognized. Maturing in the Harlem Renaissance, his career demonstrates the solidity of that movement as the main foundation of modern African American literature. Dream Variations To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently,      Dark like me— That is my dream! To fling my arms wide In the face of the sun, Dance! Whirl! Whirl! Till the quick day is done. Rest at pale evening... A tall, slim tree... Night coming tenderly      Black like me.