DISCOVERY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Langston Hughes and compromise
Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear.
I have as much right As the other fellow has To stand On my two feet And own the land.
—FROM “DEMOCRACY,” LANGSTON HUGHES
beyond his famous “jazz poems”—he also wrote essays, novels, and plays, and was a social activ- ist. In his new book, Which Sin to Bear? Authentic- ity and Compromise in Langston Hughes, English professor David Chinitz, PhD, investigates, among other things, the complex ideas about compromise that thread throughout Hughes’s life and work. “Basically it’s a book about the dilemmas that
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Hughes faced at a time when it was very hard to make a living as an African American writer, and how he worked through them— both artistic concerns and problems of personal identity,” says Chinitz. Hughes wrote a number
of poems and essays on the subject of compromise, and, according to Chinitz, Hughes generally seems to be resistant to it. But in examining the facts of Hughes’s life and work, the truth is somewhat more complicated. Chinitz cites a dilemma Hughes faced in the
Dr. Chinitz
1950s while writing a book for children about famous black musicians. According to Chinitz, Hughes would presumably have liked to include a feature on Paul Robeson, who was a successful singer and actor. Robeson, however, had Com- munist leanings and had been interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and so, despite Robeson’s significant contribu- tions to black music, Hughes left him out of the book. This compromise, although criticized by writer and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, would have seemed necessary to Hughes, Chinitz says. “Hughes was a very private person—he
U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (1944)
never published a defense of his decisions,” says Chinitz. “So I look at his writings surrounding a decision like that and try to understand the ra- tionale. His denunciations of compromise sound decided, and yet what was going on in his life and career doesn’t always square.”
he writer Langston Hughes is probably best known for his poetry within the Harlem Renaissance of the ‘20s and ‘30s, but his body of work and literary legacy extend far
24 LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO
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