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  To the Stars: The Story of Kansas  

Poet spent early years in Kansas

BY BECCY TANNER

The Wichita Eagle

This is one in a series of vignettes celebrating Kansas history. The series' name comes from the state motto, Ad astra per aspera: "To the stars through difficulties."

"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 bathed 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.

--Langston Hughes' first published poem,

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers," 1921

Langston Hughes' poems reach across generations and time.

Forty-one years ago this week, Hughes died from complications after surgery. He was 65. It was 1967.

It was a year when Israel defeated Arab nations in the Six Day War. The United States held its first Super Bowl, and physician Christiaan Bernard performed the first heart transplant on a person in Cape Town, South Africa.

Yet, the world paused briefly to remember a talented poet who had roots in Kansas.

Although poet and writer Hughes was born in Joplin, Mo., in 1902, he grew up in eastern Kansas, living in Lawrence, Topeka and Kansas City from 1903 to 1915.

His parents separated when he was young, so Hughes lived with his grandmother, Mary Patterson Leary Langston.

Her first husband, Sheridan Leary, died while following John Brown at Harper's Ferry in 1859. Her second husband was also an abolitionist.

Langston Hughes' great uncle was John Mercer Langston, one of the first African-Americans elected to public office in the United States, in Ohio in 1855.

Langston Hughes grew up with a keen awareness of racial inequalities. He often turned to books for comfort and to learn about the world. At school in Topeka, white children sometimes taunted him and threw rocks at him.

Hughes left Lawrence for Chicago in 1915. For several years, he traveled the world, doing odd jobs when he needed money, and writing thoughts and experiences. He worked as a waiter, cook, doorman and sailor.

By the 1920s, Hughes was living in New York City and had become one of the nation's most important writers in the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that celebrated African-American life and culture.

In the 1930s, he lived in the Soviet Union, working as a motion picture writer in Moscow. Later, he was a news correspondent in Madrid.

In the 1950s, Hughes wrote about a fictional African-American comic character who dealt with everyday life, Jesse B. Semple, in "Simple" columns for the Chicago Defender and New York Post.

He affected American culture in other ways. The title of the Broadway play "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry was inspired by Hughe's poem, "Dream Deferred":

"What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore

And then run?..."

Hughes was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961.

He died May 22, 1967.

Hughes' residence at 20 E. 127th St. in Harlem is considered a New York landmark. And the block of East 127th is known as Langston Hughes Place.

Reach Beccy Tanner at 316-268-6336 or btanner@wichitaeagle.com.