Langston Hughes and what's lost when a poet is made palatable

Langston Hughes is one of the most recognized names in American literature. His poems are taught in classrooms, quoted at marches and memorials and Sunday morning services.

But that celebration comes with a cost. Because the Hughes most people know, has been made comfortable. Sanitized. Stripped of his edges. And what gets lost in that sanitizing is the very thing that made him matter.

Here was a man who believed that art was never neutral, that democracy was not something America had already achieved but something it still owed its people. 

He championed that Black Americans practicing respectability politics was itself a form of political control.

He wrote about it. He lived it. And in his own life, he faced the impossible choice that respectability politics always eventually demands: your safety or your principles. Your platform or your truth.

Randal Maurice Jelks is a professor, documentary producer, and award-winning author. In his new book “My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy”, he strips away the veneer placed on Hughes's legacy to reveal the radical, clear-eyed democratic thinker underneath.

For those of us in Detroit, a city that has built its own armor out of necessity, that has dressed for work and maintained its properties and measured its words as a matter of survival…this book is not just about Langston Hughes.

It is about every Black family that ever had to decide how much of themselves to show, in order to make it through the door.

Dr. Randal Maurice Jelks joined The Metro to talk about the book and the audacity of Hughes to write truth to power. 

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