(ANSWER KEY)
INTRODUCTION TO LANGSTON HUGHES
Have students exchange papers and check the answers as you read items 1-16. This information should be saved for use in the activities.
1. Langston Hughes is also known as James Mercer Langston Hughes.
2. Hughes attended an integrated school while living with his grandmother.
3. Hughes was a man who loved all people and knew how to make them laugh, cry and think.
4. Hughes was born February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri.
5. Charles Harold Langston was Virginia's first black congressman.
6. Hughes's father moved to Mexico where he became a successful cattle rancher.
7. Hughes attended Central High School where he was an honor roll student and participated in sports and student politics. He also discovered the poetry of Carl Sandburg. Hughes wanted to write poetry as Sandburg did so he could reach ordinary black people who may never in their lives have read poetry.
8. Hughes's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was written on the back of envelopes when he was making a return trip to Mexico to visit his father.
9. Hughes's father wanted him to study engineering, but Langston insisted he wanted to study literature at Columbia University in New York City.
10. Hughes got a job as cabin boy on a freighter and traveled to the west coast of Africa. This trip inspired him to write the poem "American Heartbreak.”
11. While working as a doorman and a bouncer at a nightclub, Hughes was introduced to jazz.
12. Hughes returned to Harlem, the predominantly back section of New York City's Manhattan. Harlem was experiencing an explosion in the arts that came to be called the Harlem Renaissance.
13. "Renaissance" means a rebirth. It was the rebirth of the African-American culture. Racism made the development of such a community impossible in the South. As thousands of blacks migrated north during and after World War I looking for new opportunities, Harlem attracted gifted black writers, artists, and musicians.
14. His relationship with women did not last long, and he would never marry.
15. Langston's sense of humor helped him hold off despair and bitterness when the promise of the Harlem Renaissance gave way to reinforced prejudice and fewer economic opportunities for black Americans in the 1930s and 1940s. He managed to find ironic humor even in segregation itself.
16. Langston Hughes never forgot who he was. He saw beyond the injustices that had been visited upon black people to the human condition that we all share. It was this that made him laugh and cry, not just for black people, but for all humanity.