>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
[ Silence ]   [ Background ]
>> Hi, everybody.
I think we'll get -- whoops, that's not what I want to do.
I think we'll get started.
[Inaudible] have a nice big crowd here today for our event.
Thank you for coming.
My name's Rob Casper, I am the head of the Poetry
and Literature Center here at the Library of Congress.
And I want to welcome you
to our first literary birthdays event this spring, celebrating poet
and writer Langston Hughes.
Before I say anything more, I should also give a special round of thanks
to a number of people who are here from the library.
Alice Birney from the Manuscript Division
who put together this tabletop display,
and I'll talk to you a little bit about that later; Carolyn Brown,
the Director of the Office of Scholarly Programs
under which the Poetry and Literature Center is housed;
and John Cole from the Center
for the Book who's been an instrumental partner in all sorts
of cosponsored programs that we're doing.
We're thrilled to be here to kick off this season
and to kick off Black History Month at the Library of Congress.
One month from now on March 1, the day after Black History Month,
we will also celebrate Ralph Ellison's birthday
on the day as part of this series.
If you could, please check your cell phones and your electronic devices
and make sure that they're off.   It, you know, interferes with the --
interferes with the recording and with the sound.
I'm sure you've heard that a million, zillion times.
I'd also like to tell you a little bit
about the Poetry and Literature Center.
We're turning 75 this October.
We are home to the nation's Poet Laureate consultant in poetry
who right now is Philip Levine.
We also put on all sorts of literary readings, panels, festivals,
and events like this throughout the year.
If you want to find out more about us and sign
up for our reading list -- we have the only list that you can sign
up for to find out about literary programs at the library --
we have a signup sheet in the back, so when you leave you can sign it.
We also do have books by both authors and, of course,
the meaty Langston Hughes poetry book which I'm sure you all have,
but if you don't, no better time than today to buy it.
You can read about Langston Hughes and about our future programs --
future poets in the program that you have.
If you don't, there should be one in the seat next to you.
We could not be more excited
to have our city's Poet Laureate Deloris Kendrick
and Evie Shockley here to help us celebrate Langston Hughes'
110th birthday.   I should also say that --
that on February 18 over at the Folger Shakespeare Library,
which is just around the corner from here,
our Poet Laureate will be reading as part
of the Poetry in Progress Program.   >> There are five poets.
>> There are five poets, and among them Miss Kendrick.
That will happen at 6"30 at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Both -- both of our readers will read their favorite Langston Hughes'
poems and Miss Shockley will also discuss the importance
of Langston Hughes in her own work and read a few
of her own poems as well.
Following the poets, Alice Birney, who I introduced at the beginning
of -- of -- of my introductions, will come up to talk
about this tabletop display and about the Manuscript Division.
The Manuscript Division does valuable work for the Library,
and really for American culture, preserving materials like this.
So she'll give a little background to --
as to the various materials we have here
and talk a little bit about the division.
But without further ado, please welcome our readers.
[ Applause ]   [ Silence ]
>> I'm not familiar with -- I've been in Washington all my life,
I was born here, and I've been out -- in and out of the this library --
in fact, I like to tell people I got my bachelor's degree here.
[ Laughter ]
Because when I was in college, I couldn't afford all my books,
so I opened it at nine and closed it at ten.
[ Laughter ]
And got -- so I know that side of the library.
But I have never -- I don't remember this part of it, and I am very happy
to be here, and happy to see all of you who are taking time
out of your day to listen to poetry and to listen to this program.
As one who was born and bred in the world
of poetry, I welcome this moment.   I share with you in the celebration
of the 110th birthday of Langston Hughes.
I wish to express my sincere appreciation to the Library
of Congress for creating this important moment
in American literature.
Some time ago I was invited into Yale to read with fellow poets
in an event celebrating Hughes and his work.
Yale has a lot of his work in the library, I suppose you know.
It was an outstanding gathering,
and what impressed me most was not only the wonderful tributes
but also the joy that embraced the room as poetry was read
by the authors, and the Yale Professors Jazz Group.
These were a group of professors who in their free time played jazz,
and since they had turned the library into a club, it was amazing
to hear the jazz coming out of those profess --
you see how you can get stereotypes in your mind?
Professors don't do things like that.
[ Laughter ]   Maybe they don't like jazz.
These guys were something else.
And I left them at midnight and they wanted to know why I was leaving
at midnight, and I said, "Well, it's late and I have" --
and they said, "This is New York.   Stay with the jazz."
They gave us music to die for.
Since Yale has many of Hughes' papers, I was intrigued to see
in the library collection of letters addressed to Hughes,
outstanding of which was a note written in longhand
from Lorraine Hansberry asking permission
to use an excerpt from "Harlem."
I'm going to just say a few words about that process.
We were talking about it just before we came down,
the business of how important it is that we continue to write;
that we don't let the machines take over language bearing messages
to each other, but that we write, because had she not done that,
I would not have seen her little note in handwriting,
his response to her, and then also the response
that Gwendolyn Brooks had made to something that they had asked for.
It's very important.   Don't get me started.
[ Laughter ]   so let's begin with that poem.
"What happens to a dream differed?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or just fester like a sore -- and then runs?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust over -- or crust with sugar over like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?"
Of course, Hansberry's title of her award-winning play "A Raisin
in the Sun" was born of this poem, while in many ways it is a codicil
of the century, that poem.   At one point in Hughes' life,
he was connected would the Karamu Theater --
performing arts theater in Cleveland, Ohio.
His biographer has written that most of his plays were staged there;
Arnold Rampersad, if you know his work, he mentioned that.
That Hughes' work was staged in the theater
that premiered the staged version of my book, "The Women of Plums:
Poems in the Voices of Slave Women," in 1993 honors me deeply.
Then we have what we -- most of us may be familiar with,
and I'm not sure that -- I'm sure that all of you are familiar
with these poems that I'll be reading, but I think some
of them are famous and some of them are not.
[ Pause ]
This is The Negro Speaks of Rivers.
"I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world
and older than the flood [sic] 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."
[ Pause ]
For all of the literary world, Hughes transforms the ordinary river
into a moving metaphor of boundless identity, progress, and power,
and he defies gravity with the power of the first person singular.
I don't [inaudible].
I'm still here he shouts, as he shouts his humanity.
And I'll read that little poem for you.
"I've been scarred and battered, my hopes the wind done scattered.
Snow has friz me, sun has baked me,
looks like between 'em they done tried to make me stop laughin',
stop lovin', stop livin' -- but I don't care!
I'm still here!"   [ Pause ]
Finally, I would like to present --
I would like to show you the neat little gift in the corner
of his world that allows us to celebrate his genius in a way
that gives genius an Amen, as in "Harlem," his great challenge
to the universe of the unforgiving comes in the voice of a child.
Who can resist it.
Who cannot want anxiously to open that gift
and breathe the light inside.
Who cannot share in Hughes -- the poignancy of Merry-go-Round,
a poem that he has written in the light -- in the voice of a child.
"Where is the Jim Crow section on the merry-go-round" --
>> [ Inaudible ]   >> I'm sorry?
>> Oh, no.   >> I'll start again.
"Where is the Jim Crow section on this merry-go-round,
Mister, 'cause I want to ride.
Down South where I come from White and colored cannot sit side by side.
Down South on the train there's a Jim Crow car.
On the bus we're put in the back --
But there ain't no back to a merry-go-round!
Where's the horse for a kid that's black?"
[ Pause ]
There, then, and now is this man called Langston Hughes,
and listen to simple, his archetype of every man.
As simple says, fluently.   [ Pause ]
Got these pages, I had them marked out of --
"When I get to be 99 and my running days is done, then I do better.
When I get to be 92 and just can't do, I'll do better.
When I get to 93, if the women's don't love me,
then I must do better.
When I get to be 94 and can't drive no more, I'll have to do better.
When I get to be 95, more dead than alive,
[inaudible] necessary to do better.
When I get to be 96, I don't know no more tricks,
I reckon I'll do better.
When I get to be 97 and on my way to heaven, I'll try and do better.
When I get to 98 and I see Saint Peter
at the gate, I know I'll do better.   [ Laughter ]
When I get to be 99, remembering it were fine, then I'll do better.
But even when I'm 101, if I'm still having fun, I'll start all
over again just like I begun, because what could be better?"
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
[ Pause ]
>> Thank you, Deloris Kendrick, for your words.
It's my pleasure to be here today sharing the podium with the author
of the much-loved poetry collection, "Women of the Plums" --
"Women of plums," and sharing with all present this joyful occasion,
a celebration of the 110th anniversary
of the birth of Langston Hughes.
I'd like to thank Rob Casper and everyone he previously named here
at the Library of Congress who made this event
and my participation possible.
My admiration of Langston Hughes is longstanding and deep.
I have read him, taught him, and taken him in certain ways
as a model for my own poetry.
He's like another poet I love, Lucille Clifton, in writing poems
that employ such everyday words about such common situations
that it can be easy for the casual reader to dismiss them
as unsophisticated or superficial.   But, again, like Clifton --
or like Robert Frost to offer another example --
Hughes' work reminds us that the simplest words can be arranged
to articulate very powerful even revolutionary ideas,
and that every day people and occurrences can be the source
of transformative insight and emotion.
One of the things about Hughes that is important
to me is his cosmopolitanism, if I can use that word.
Not the leisure, jet setting sort of cosmopolitanism,
but the sort of emerges from a deep curiosity about the world,
an ability to see the connections between this place and that place,
and the willingness to engage with experiences that are not his own.
This quality led him to travel around the globe beginning
when he was still a young man, and his travels inspired poems
like this one titled simply Johannesburg Mines.
"In the Johannesburg mines there are 240,000 Native Africans working.
What kind of poem would you make out of that?
240,000 natives working in the Johannesburg mines."
When I first encountered this poem, I assumed it was
from a much later period in his career, in the '60s perhaps,
when many of his poems were drawing connections between the conditions
of African Americans and the condition of African peoples
and nations enjoying their newly gained independence
or still involved in anti-colonial struggle.
But it turns out to have been one of his earliest poems;
published in 1925 not long after he returned from a visit, his first,
to Africa which he managed by working as a crewman aboard a ship.
I was quite intrigued by his ars poetica which asks us
to consider what the conventions of poetry if strictly adhered
to preclude us from writing about.
I decided to take the challenge his poem offers.
That is, to try write a poem about stark even painful statistics
that expose a society's racism while using conventional poetic technique
and form.
My poem is called Statistical Haiku (or How do they Discount us?
Let Me Count the Ways.) "only three
of 100 black boys entering kindergarten will graduate college.
Every day a black person under 20 commits suicide.
Plucked magnolia blossoms, funereal perfume.
A black man is 700 percent more likely than a white man
to be sentenced to prison.   Scattered thundershowers in May.
Every three minutes a black child is born into poverty.
Pine needles line the forest floor."
Thinking about Johannesburg Mines alongside other poems
from the same period, such as the Negro Speaks of Rivers
or the Weary Blues enabled me
to see certain continuities in Hughes' career.
He was always a poet engaged with issues of race
in the broadest sense; always a poet concerned
with the oppression not only
of African Americans but of others as well.
This has been particularly inspiring to me in light of the fact
that shortly after his first collection was published,
Hughes decided that he would make his living solely
from his artistic work.
Writing political poetry under those circumstances,
as a black man mostly -- most of his life, I think all of his life
in Jim Crow America,
thus represented a truly admirable integrity.
Consider this context as I read the following poem
from his 1938 collection A New Song.
And this is Let America be America Again.
"Let America be America again.   Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain seeking a home
where he himself is free.   (America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed --
let it be that great strong land of love
where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
that any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty is crowned
with no false patriotic wreath, but opportunity is real,
and life is free, equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
nor freedom in this homeland of the free.)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart.
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land.
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek --
and finding only the same old stupid plan of dog eat dog,
of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
tangled in that ancient endless chain of profit,
power, gain, of grab the land!   Of grab the gold!
Of grab the ways of satisfying need!   Of work the men!
Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.   I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean --
hungry yet today despite the dream.   Beaten yet today -- O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
the poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamed --
who dreamt our basic dream in that Old World while still a serf
of kings, who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, that even
yet its mighty daring sings in every brick and stone,
in every furrow turned that's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas in search of what I meant
to be my home -- for I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
and Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
and torn from Black Africa's strand I came
to build a homeland of the free.   The free? Who said the free?
Not me? Surely not me?   The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed and all the songs we've sung
and all the hopes we've held and all the flags we've hung,
the millions who have nothing for our pay --
except the dream that's almost dead today.
O, let America be America again -- the land that never has been yet --
and yet must be -- the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine -- the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME --
who made America, whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose --
the steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on people's lives,
we must take back our land again, America!
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me,
and yet I swear this oath -- America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, the rape and rot
of graft, and stealth, and lies, we, the people, must redeem the land,
the mines, the plants, the rivers, the mountains
and the endless plain -- all, all the stretch
of these great green states -- and make America again!"
[ Applause ]   I'm sure he heard that.
[ Laughter ]
Hughes became famous as a very young man for writing poems
that embody what some might call a "black esthetic."
That is, his poetry about race was far in excess
of the subject of racism.
He wrote frequently and movingly about the day-to-day lives
of black people in their communities.
Dramas that turned on their "intraracial" interactions,
situations that reflected and gave shape
to their own cultural values and cosmologies.
One of his key contributions to the tradition
of African American poetry, and by extension to the tradition
of American poetry, was the development of the blues form,
a poetic form based on the musical verse at the root
of African American blues culture.
Though he began working in this form in the 1920s, he still employed it
in the 1940s, as in this wonderful piece called Widow Woman.
"O, that last long ride is a ride everybody must take.
Yes, that last long ride's a ride everybody must take.
And that final stop is a stop everybody must make.
When they put you in the ground and they throw dirt in your face --
I say, they put you in the ground and throw dirt in your face,
that's one time, pretty Papa, you'll sure stay in your place.
[ Laughter ]
You was a mighty lover and you ruled me many years, a mightily lover,
baby, cause you ruled me many years.
If I live to be thousand, I'll never dry these tears.
I don't want nobody else and don't nobody want me --
I say, I don't want nobody else and don't nobody else want me.
Yet, you can never tell when a woman like me is free."
[ Laughter ]
I love the hilarious ending of that poem
in which the speaker confirms what you only dimly sense in the second
and third stanzas, that she is not particularly sorry
to see her husband go.   [ Laughter ]
The capacity of the blues form
to really fluidly incorporate ambiguity is one
of the things I learned from reading Hughes' work.
I tried my own hand at it in this poem, which --
it's not a blues poem in total
but it employs a blues stanza towards the end.
It's called Ode to my Blackness.
"You are my shelter from the storm and the storm;
my anchor and the troubled sea.
Night casts you warm and glittering upon my shoulders.
Some would say you give off no heat.
Some folks can't see beyond the closest star.
You are the tunnel John Henry died to carve.
I see the light at the end of you, the beginning.
I dig down deep and there you are at the root of my blues.
You're all thick and dark, enveloping the root of my blues.
Seem like it's so hard to let you go when I got nothing to lose.
Without you, I would just be a self of my former shadow."
[ Laughter ]   [ Applause ]
The next poem I want to read is from Hughes' writings in the '50s.
You've figured out by now we're kind of going through the decades, right?
He published in 1951 a book-length poem made up of many smaller poems
in various Harlem-like voices, all coming together
to form what he calls "a montage of a dream differed."
The well-known poem from which the title
of Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin
in the Sun is drawn appears in this volume.
My own favorite poem in the montage is in the voice of a student
who has migrated from Harlem to north --
to Harlem from North Carolina, a state I called home
for many years and still kind of do.   It's called Theme for English B.
"The instructor said, Go home and write a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you -- then, it will be true.
I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college
on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem, through a park,
then I cross Saint Nicholas, Eighth Avenue, Seventh,
and I come to the Y, the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It's not easy to know what is true for you or me at twenty-two, my age.
But I guess I'm what I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
Hear you, hear me -- we two -- you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.)   Me -- who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records -- Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me not
like the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be a part of you, instructor.
You are white -- yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you, I guess you learn from me --
though you're older -- and white -- and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B."
In 1961 Hughes published another book-length poem whose title conveys
the biting humor that runs through it
and evidences the growing impatience of African Americans
with second class citizenship and foreshadows the black political
and artistic rebellions that that decade would see.
The volume was entitled Ask Your Mama, and the poem I will share
from this collection is called Horn of Plenty.
This is one of those moments where Hughes' experiments
with typography I can't really communicate,
but if you get a chance, and you buy this book, for example, you can look
and see how he uses dollar signs and cent signs in part of this poem.
Horn of Plenty.
"Singers, singers like -- O, singers like Odetta and that statue
on Deadlows Island managed by Saul Hurak.
Dancers, Bojangle late lamented, Katherine Dunham, Al and Leon,
Arthur, Carmine, Alvin, Mary, jazzers Duke and Dizzy, Eric Dolphy,
Miles and Ella and Miss Nina.
Stray horn his backstage with Luther.
Do you read music?
And Louis saying, not enough to hurt my playing.
Gospel singers who want to pat golden crosses to a Cadillac,
Bonds and Still and Margaret Still, Global Trotters, baseball batters,
Jackie, Willie, Campanella.
Football players, leather punchers, unforgotten Joes and Sugar Rays
who break away like comets from lesser stars in an orbit.
To move out to Saint Albans where the grass is greener,
schools are better for their children, and other kids less meaner
than in the quarter of the Negroes where winter's name is Hawkins
and Niagara Falls is frozen if show fares more than 30 cents.
I moved out to Long Island,
even farther than Saint Albans (which lately is stone nowhere).
I moved out even farther, further,
farther on the Sound way off the turnpike --
and I'm the only colored.   Got there!
Yes, I made it!   Name in the papers every day!
Famous -- the hard way -- from nobody and nothing to where I am.
They know me, too, downtown, all across the country, Europe --
me who used to be a nobody, nothing but another shadow in the quarter
of the Negros, now a name!   My name -- a name!
Yet they asked me out on my patio, where did I get my money!
I said, from your mama!   [ Laughter ]
They wondered was I sensitive and had a chip on my shoulder?
Did I know Charlie Mingus?
And why did Richard Wright live all that while in Paris instead
of coming home to decent die in Harlem or the south side of Chicago
or the womb of Mississippi?
And one should love one's country for one's country is your mama.
Living in Saint Albans, shadow of the Negros, Westport and New Canaan
in the shadow of the Negroes --
highly integrated means too many Negroes, even for the Negroes --
especially for the first ones who move
in unobtrusive book-of-the-month club in cases seeking suburb
with no jukebox, pool hall, or bar on the corner.
Seeking lawns and shade trees, seeking peace and quiet,
autumn leaves in autumn, Holland bulbs in spring,
decent garbage service, birds that really sing.
$40,000 houses -- payments not belated --
the only Negroes in the block integrated.
Horn of plenty in escrow to Joe Glasser, the Sermon on the Mount
in Billington's Church of Rubber.
Love thy neighbor as thyself in George Sokolsky's column.
Birds that really sing.
Every day's tomorrow, and election time is always four years
from the other, and my lawn mower new and shiny
from the big glass shopping center cuts my hair on credit.
They rung my bell to ask me could I recommend a maid.
I said, yes, your mama."   [ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
To close, I'd like to read a short poem from Hughes' final collection,
The Panther and the Lash,
published in 1967 the year of his death.
It brings us full circle to his interest in the relationship
of African Americans with the people of Africa,
and South Africa in particular.
It also embodies perfectly the sense of possibility
that consistently accompanied his critiques
of oppression throughout his career, his life.
It's called Question and Answer.
"Durbin, Birmingham, Cape Town, Atlanta Johannesburg, Watts.
The earth around struggling, fighting, dying.
For what? A world to gain.   Groping, hoping, waiting.
For what? A world to gain.   Dreams kicked asunder.
Why not go under?   There's a world to gain.
But suppose I don't want it.   Why take it?
To remake it."   Thank you.
[ Applause ]   [ Pause ]
>> Greetings on this wonderful birthday celebration
of American poet and author Langston Hughes.
The Manuscript Division is pleased to be able to cosponsor this event
and -- Manuscript Division of the Library
of Congress has collected Americana since 1897.
The division seeks to document with primary materials major pioneers
in American history, politics, civil rights, science,
architecture, theater, and literature.
Among some 2000 literary collections of personal papers,
our dozen different collections
of Walt Whitman papers would rank as our most important.
When Langston Hughes wrote his poem I, too, Sang America,
he added his own unique voice to those
of Walt Whitman's many other literary children,
such as Hart Crane and Allen Ginsberg and many others.
When asked to present a display of his papers, my first thought was
that we do not have a major collection
of Langston Hughes manuscripts.
His collection is at the Beinecke Library in Yale.
It was his gift and bequest to Yale.
We have only a single folder of a separate Langston Hughes collection.
However, when I began to look into our many groups
of interrelated literary and African American collections,
I found very large and diverse troves
of relatively unknown letters and writings by Hughes.
I discovered that he was a great networker
with an abundance of literary energy.
His output in poetry fiction, essays, children's writing, opera,
translations, editing, and pictorial histories was truly impressive.
In accomplishing and promoting all this variety of literary writing,
he touched many lives, and we have collections representing some
of them.
Lucky for literary historians that he did not text his friends
[ Laughter ]
but sent them nice paper communications.
[ Pause ]
I brought today examples from that small huge folder --
Hughes folder, as well as from letters and writings found
in other collections, the Ralph Ellison papers,
letters to Melvin Tolson, two play scripts
from the Copyright Deposit Drama collection, and interview notes
from African American poet James Emanuel.
There was no room to display other Hughes items noted in the papers
of Shirley Jackson, Byron White, Fredric Worthen, Hugh Smyth,
Giles Rich, Faith Berry, Frank Kameny,
and the records of the NAACP.   That's for further researchers.
So from our small Langston Hughes folder,
I shall show first his first published poem,
which Miss Kendrick read to you.   And this is a pre --
signed presentation copy of the Negro Speaks of Rivers 1921,
with decoration by Aaron Douglas.
Hughes dedicated this poem to the radical leader
of the New Negro Movement, W.E.B. Dubois.
At the age of 19, he already may have been aware
of his authorial future enough to have a fine copy produced
of this early poem, or else it was printed later
when he became more famous -- which is what I suspect.
The other item in that small folder --
there are about a dozen items in there --
which I bought is the draft of his --
drafts of his Booker T. Washington.
It's on the easel there in a mat, and there are two of the five drafts
that we have there on the easel.
He did this in May 30th and June 1st, 1941, he --
lovely that he dates each of his drafts.
He has a very nice handwriting, and he's meticulous in all his records.
By this time, he was a prolific poet, novelist, and dramatist,
representing the Harlem renaissance.
His [inaudible] salutes the more moderate black leader Booker T.
Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute
which Hughes had visited in 1927.
And you'll be able to come and see these later.
I won't pick them up.
I have next two play scripts that come from our collection
of some 250,000 typed scripts of plays registered
for copyright protection as unpublished plays.
And I've been go going through those for the last 20 years
[ Laughter ]   picking out plays to keep.
And among those plays is Mule Bone registered in 1931.
These are mostly carbon typescripts.
Coauthored, as you all know, by Zora Neale Hurston.
And this is the play which caused the famous rupture
in the Hughes/Hurston friendship.
They did not agree about a lot of things in the play.
And that's all laid out in a publication, "1991" --
the first publication of this 1931 play was in a book "1991"
which explicates the whole conflict between it two of them.
Then I pulled from the same collection
of plays a play I'd never heard of but I saw that it was
by Hughes and I saved it.
And it's very , Blood on the Fields registered in 1934.
This is an unusual find.
It's coauthored with Ella Winter, and it was not published until 2000
under a new title, Harvest.
This is a leftist drama about a California cotton field strike.
We have the original version.
Ella Winter was later blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten causing her
to relocate to England, but Hughes shifted gears and remained
in Harlem most of his life.
He managed to survive all these political changes.
A major source for our Hughes materials is our Ralph
Ellison collection.
This is my most heavily used literary manuscript collection;
the papers of the author of the "Invisible Man."
I was lucky enough to go his apartment in Harlem
and collect a lot of these materials after his death.
It was difficult to make a choice among all the fat folders
of Langston Hughes' correspondence and writings
which Mrs. Ellison saved.
So many researchers had copied the Richard Wright
and Langston Hughes letters in Part I of the Ellison papers
over the last 13 years that they had to be removed from service
and replaced with photocopies.
So I investigated the folders in Part II of the collection,
which was only added in 2010.
This Part II is unknown to most researchers and was not available
when Arnold Rampersad published his biographies
of Ellison and of Hughes.
On the table are five different items from this collection:
A signed portrait by Langston Hughes to Ralph Ellison, April 1, 1937 --
and I should just note that Prints
and Photographs Division holds quality portraits of Hughes
by Gordon Parks and by Carl van Vechten.
A little postal card from Yaddo was at the end
of the table in the front.
It's written in pencil by Langston Hughes and "look who's here."
Carson McCullers, who finished the postcard 1942, containing --
it contains both of their handwriting greetings
to Ralph Ellison.   And then there is a letter in ink
from Langston Hughes aboard the Los Angeles Limited 1948,
written on the train's own letterhead stationery.
They had such things in those days.
And he writes about Arthur Kussler, he's networking, and then he says,
he's going to Palo Alto "where I'm due to speak tomorrow.
I have just sued the school board
for denying the high school auditorium,
and are determined to have me anyhow.
[ Pause ]
Six cancellations so far but all have paid
so it makes me no difference."   [ Laughter ]
He begins that paragraph, by the way, "I'm feudin' and afightin' all
over this American country."
And I think that's a good example of his energy and persistence,
which he coupled with good nature, and got his way.
The next item is a theater program for "Street Scene," 1947,
a production for which Hughes contributed the lyrics.
Elmer Rice wrote the play, Kurt Weill did the music,
Jo Mielziner did the scenery and lighting.
Terrific. The next is an annotated type script drafts,
a whole sheaf of drafts of his poem Good Morning Stalingrad.
It isn't dated, this one, and he sent them to Ralph for his perusal.
Hughes recorded the finished version of this poem in 1945,
and it was included in his collected poems.
From another collection, The Papers
of Melvin Tolson," I brought one item.
Tolson was an author, educator, poet, mayor of Langston, Oklahoma,
and Poet Laureate of Liberia.   [ Laughter ]
I brought a 1955 letter concerning Langston's concerned production
of his play Simple Takes a Wife, and it shows how he,
in a very good natured way, is networking with --
with those who would help him make these productions.
I don't think it ever happened.
The final item is from two pages from the papers of James Emanuel.
This is a poet and educator born in 1921.
He contacted me about saving his papers,
and I didn't know what they were but I agreed, and I'm glad I did.
He lives in France.
He claims to have invented the jazz haiku.
And what we have here at the end of the table
on the yellow pages is Langston Hughes' interview notes
that James Emanuel typed up from his shorthand notes in 1965 all
about how he writes and how he feels about literature.
And the first page Hughes talks about white critics.
He says they did not, in his early career,
take account of black poets and writers.
Allen Tate and his group and Kenyan Review
and Partisan View were interested only in white poets.
And then on the second page he says, "Poetry" --
he labored over his prose but -- "poetry comes easy to me," says he.
"I have enjoyed all of my career."
You're invited now to come up in small groups and view these items.
I'll answer questions individually.   Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Thanks to both of our readers, and thanks to Alice Birney.
As she said, please come up and look at -- look at our tabletop display.
Again, there are books for sale out in the back so -- and you --
I'm sure both our readers will be happy to sign their books.
And please come back March 1 at noon to see what Alice brings
from the Ellison collection.   Thank you, very much for coming.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.