Langston Hughes: Poems

Representation in other media

The poem "Danse Africaine" as wall poem on a wall of the building at the Nieuwe Rijn 46, Leiden, Netherlands

Hughes was featured reciting his poetry on the album Weary Blues (MGM, 1959), with music by Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather, and he also contributed lyrics to Randy Weston's Uhuru Afrika (Roulette, 1960).

Harry Burleigh set the poem "Lovely, dark, and lonely one" from the 1932 collection The Dream Keeper and Other Poems[98] to music in 1935,[99] his last art song. Italian composer Mira Sulpizi set Hughes' text to music in her 1968 song "Lyrics".[100]

Hughes' life has been portrayed in film and stage productions since the late 20th century. In Looking for Langston (1989), British filmmaker Isaac Julien claimed him as a black gay icon—Julien thought that Hughes' sexuality had historically been ignored or downplayed. Film portrayals of Hughes include Gary LeRoi Gray's role as a teenage Hughes in the short subject film Salvation (2003) (based on a portion of his autobiography The Big Sea), and Daniel Sunjata as Hughes in the Brother to Brother (2004). Hughes' Dream Harlem, a documentary by Jamal Joseph, examines Hughes' works and environment.

Paper Armor (1999) by Eisa Davis and Hannibal of the Alps (2005)[101] by Michael Dinwiddie are plays by African-American playwrights that address Hughes's sexuality. Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus, included a black gay character, played by Isaiah Washington, who invokes the name of Hughes and punches a homophobic character, saying: "This is for James Baldwin and Langston Hughes."

Hughes was also featured prominently in a national campaign sponsored by the Center for Inquiry (CFI) known as African Americans for Humanism.[102]

Hughes' Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, written in 1960, was performed for the first time in March 2009 with specially composed music by Laura Karpman at Carnegie Hall, at the Honor festival curated by Jessye Norman in celebration of the African-American cultural legacy.[103] Ask Your Mama is the centerpiece of "The Langston Hughes Project",[104] a multimedia concert performance directed by Ron McCurdy, professor of music in the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California.[105] The European premiere of The Langston Hughes Project, featuring Ice-T and McCurdy, took place at the Barbican Centre, London, on November 21, 2015, as part of the London Jazz Festival mounted by music producers Serious.[106][107]

The novel Harlem Mosaics (2012) by Whit Frazier depicts the friendship between Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and tells the story of how their friendship fell apart during their collaboration on the play Mule Bone.[108]

On September 22, 2016, his poem "I, Too" was printed on a full page of The New York Times in response to the riots of the previous day in Charlotte, North Carolina.[109]


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