"We, Too, Rise with You": Recovering Langston Hughes's African (Re)Turn 1954-1960 in An African Treasury, the Chicago Defender, and Black Orpheus.

   Oh, Congo brother
   With your tribal marks,
   We, too, emerge
   From ageless darks.
   We, too, emit
   A frightening cry
   From body scarred,
   Soul that won't die.
   We encarnadine the sky.--Langston Hughes, "We, Too" 11. 1-9

In spite of a persistent tendency among critics to dismiss and occlude his radical work, most readers of Langston Hughes now know that Hughes was a revolutionary writer. The "Harlem Renaissance" poet who in the 1920s wrote "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "The Weary Blues" is also the "red" poet who in the 1930s wrote powerful poems embracing socialism ("Good Morning Revolution" and "One More 'S' in the U.S.A."), armed struggle ("The Militant"), poems eulogizing Lenin and supporting high-profile campaigns of the Communist Party USA ("Scottsboro" and "Chant for Tom Mooney"), as well as anti-colonial poems calling for Third World liberation ("Call of Ethiopia" and "Roar China!"). But while Hughes's "red" '30s have benefited greatly from recent revisionist scholarship, the recovery of his radical '50s and '60s has not kept pace. (1) This lag leaves intact the common perception that Hughes's revolutionary work belongs only to the youthful phase of Hughes's career and that his experience of being called before the McCarthy Committee in 1953 caused Hughes to turn his back on the political radicalism he had embraced during the 1930s and 1940s. (2) This depressing view of Hughes's career trajectory grows only more cynical in its treatment of his final period of work. According to some, Hughes's final collections of poetry--Ask Your Mama and The Panther and the Lash--show a weak, aging poet who, having fallen behind the times, struggles to repackage his tired, decades-old radical poetry to make it marketable to the young Black Power and Black Arts generation. (3)

Hughes's neglected body of work from 1954-1960 does not support this view of his late career as politically declining and opportunistic; instead, it reveals a black writer finding an immediate and growing renewal of revolutionary commitment and energy by embracing the new, decolonizing Africa and its writers. (4) While Hughes had a lifelong commitment to African liberation from empire, the surging pace of Third World decolonization beginning in the mid-1950s had a transformative impact on Hughes, inspiring the acceleration and deepening of Hughes's anti-colonialist nationalism and pan-Africanism that I consider here as his African (re)turn. (5) Together with Asian and other oppressed peoples, black Africans seized not only Hughes's but the world's imagination in an epochal wave of Third World decolonization and revolt marked by the 1955 gathering of Non-Aligned Nations in Bandung, Indonesia, and followed immediately by the birth of dozens of newly independent, and often left, black African states, led by Ghana (1957) and Guinea (1958).

In this essay, I examine several key texts of Hughes's African (re)turn: An African Treasury, the anthology Hughes assembled from 1954-1960, and uncollected Simple columns that Hughes penned for the Chicago Defender in the first half of 1959. I also survey briefly the poetry of Hughes's African (re)turn in the context of African and Third World liberation struggles. Significantly, Hughes began work on An African Treasury only months after appearing before the McCarthy Committee. It was a six-year project that provides a window into the process of Hughes's political transformation in response to the emergence of the new black Africa. The uncollected Simple columns--about striking back instead of "turning the other cheek" to one's oppressor and about dreams of a black nation rising in the South--mark 1959 as a pivotal year. By examining these Simple columns within the context of contemporary black news editorials regarding African decolonization, we begin to see that in the 1950s Hughes not only participated in but sought to lead the broader radicalization of the US black political imagination--inspired by the ascendant African freedom struggles--more often associated with the '60s. When viewed finally in light of the poetry of his African (re)turn, the final political arc of Hughes's career demands a profound reassessment.

"Dreaming Nigeria in my Sleep": Renewal of Political Imagination

Arnold Rampersad's authoritative biography documents the unprecedented acceleration and deepening in Hughes's relationship to Africa beginning in 1954, when he accepted an invitation from South African journalist and intellectual Henry Nxumalo to judge the third international short story competition of Drum, perhaps the central cultural vehicle of the new Africa. Prior to this point, Hughes had gone decades with "no contacts with Africa, no reliable fresh knowledge of the land he had visited in the summer of 1923 as a messman on the West Hesseltine" (237). (6) Hughes's work judging the story contest led him over several years to gather together the writings of African authors that would become An African Treasury: Articles/Essays/Stories/Poems by Black Africans, a breakthrough anthology published in 1960 that would go through six printings, translation into French and worldwide distribution. (7)

Just months after publishing African Treasury, Hughes bega, n a series of momentous trips to Africa. (8) In November, at Nnamdi Azikiwe's invitation, Hughes attended the inauguration ceremony of Azikiwe as Governor General and Commander-and-Chief, marking the transfer of power in Nigeria "from the imperial British to black African hands" (Rampersad 325). He sat alongside Ralph Bunche, W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., but he was honored when Azikiwe, after taking the oath of office, closed his address with a recitation of Hughes's "Poem" from The Weary Blues. The next year he returned to Nigeria with American artists such as Randy Weston and Nina Simone for the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) festival held at Lagos. One year later, he began a tour of Africa, starting in Uganda, where he attended the All-African Writers Conference, commonly understood to be the birthplace of modern African Anglophone literature. There, not only did he take up the burning political questions of African literature with Achebe, Soyinka, Mphahlele, Modisane, Ekwensi, and American J. Saunders Redding, but he received special recognition. Hughes was named spontaneously by the participants as the conference's "guest of honor," with Mphahele delivering a rive-minute tribute. Finally, in April 1966, Hughes emerged as a celebrity at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, covered avidly by the world press. Hughes delivered a major colloquium speech on "Black Writers in a Troubled World," in which, as Rampersad writes, "With the emphasis on Afro-American writers in the age of the freedom movement, he boldly--and perhaps dangerously--created for himself the opportunity to articulate, before an international gathering of blacks, his basic beliefs about the function of an artist" (402). Marking the distance in his journey from "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," Hughes delivered his final manifesto in Africa, in the language (now "Black Writers" instead of "Negro Artists') and in the context of anti-colonial pan-Africanism.

The transformative impact of Hughes's reconnection with Africa is one that Rampersad largely misses, in spite of his rigorous research, when he writes: "A world not new, but old and neglected, reopened quietly before him in 1954" (236). A neglected world did indeed reopen for Hughes that year, but that world--decolonizing Africa--was neither old nor quiet. Unfortunately, Rampersad does more than understate the salience of Hughes's African (re)turn. His portrait of Hughes's motivations gives us a writer mainly driven to satisfy unmet personal, emotional needs. Africa becomes a new source of the affirmation for which Hughes constantly yearned as a writer, and it also serves as a refuge in which Hughes licks the wounds he bore from his McCarthy Committee summons and its aftermath: "Thus, in the wake of the Senate hearings and with his apparent eclipse by Wright, Ellison, Brooks, Baldwin, Tolson, and others, he took increasing comfort in his tie to Africa" (237). Rampersad is at his most unhelpful when he discusses the events that triggered Hughes's interest in Africa in 1954: the extensive correspondences that Hughes initiated with a great number of Africans as he assembled An African Treasury. Noting that Hughes found himself "dreaming Nigeria in my sleep," Rampersad speculates at length about the mid-life crisis that lay under Hughes's "true" interest in Africa at this rime: "Nigeria most likely was only a token of a deeper fantasy of self-fulfillment as he approached his mid-fifties.... Peering toward his end, his death, he began to dream more and more of paternity" (238). (9) While these probings of Hughes's psyche valuably advance an understanding of important dimensions of Hughes's life and work, Rampersad's treatment diverts our attention from a crucial political dimension of Hughes's African Treasury correspondences. The phrase "dreaming Nigeria in my sleep" actually comes from a letter of March 2, 1955, that Hughes wrote to one of his closest friends, Arna Bontemps: "Man, I have now almost 50 stories now selected for my African anthology! Been dreaming Nigeria in my sleep. The Nigerians write the most vividly, the South Africans the most poetically. The Liberians not at all--inhibited by being part American, I reckon" (Arna Bontemps 330-31). Rather than a "fantasy of self-fulfillment," what is signaled by "dreaming Nigeria in my sleep" in its original context is the powerful reawakening of political and aesthetic imagination (carried into dreaming) that an artist experiences when deeply immersed in a breakthrough project or phase of work. As Hughes immersed himself in his new connections with black African writers and their work, he was moved not only at a personal level but also in terms of his politics and aesthetics. To understand the scale and political character of this immersion and its impact on Hughes's pan-Africanist and nationalist consciousness, we must recover the context of the African Treasury project.

In his introduction to the 1960 anthology, Hughes describes how he corresponded personally with the many writers he had encountered while judging the Drum contest--a remarkable group including Nigerian novelists Amos Tutuola and Cyprian Ekwensi, Ghanaian woman dramatist Efua Sutherland, and South African writer Es'kia Mphahlele. Moreover, he eventually had a call for contributions circulated widely throughout Africa: "To Prime Minister Azikiwe's chain of newspapers in Nigeria, I sent a letter asking for contributions.... My request was reprinted in numerous other papers in other parts of Africa. Within a few weeks, I began to receive floods of material from all over English-speaking Africa" (African Treasury ix). And what came out of Hughes's six years immersed in these "floods" of African writing? The anti-colonial nationalist and pan-Africanist consciousness suggested in Hughes's sarcastic remarks in his letter to Bontemps about Liberian writers--"inhibited by being part American, I suppose'--is confirmed by examining the texts in the anthology that had originally set Hughes to "dreaming Nigeria in my sleep." The Nigerians "who write most vividly" are writers who will become key figures not only in building a new national Nigerian literature but in modern postcolonial African literature as a whole: Ekwensi, Tutuola, Okara, Soyinka. The South Africans "who write most poetically" are Richard Rive and Peter Abrahams, whose stories illuminate the sparks of resistance among South Africans struggling against apartheid in their daily lives. Indeed, virtually all of the writers in Hughes's African Treasury were militant anti-colonial writers and stood prominently at the cultural frontlines of the struggle to birth a liberated black Africa. No wonder the anthology was promptly banned by the government of the Union of South Africa.

Considering the contemporaneity of many of the anthology's works, then, the title of Hughes's African anthology is somewhat misleading. "An African Treasury" suggests whimsy, nostalgia--it leads one to expect folktales, "golden classics." But the promotion of the fifth paperback edition makes very clear the volume's timely appeal and forward-looking purpose. The back cover to the fifth paperback edition bears the following text:

WHAT IS AFRICA LIKE TODAY?

   Here are some of the answers ... from natives of the once dark
   continent. Their works reflect the massive conflicts stirring the
   people from Senegal to Capetown. Here is the African personality,
   its pride of race, its pride in country, expressed in humor,
   pathos, protest and affirmation. From primitive folk story to
   polished political discussion, from gentle poetry to thunderous
   work song, all elements give voice to the native black African
   cry....

   MAYIBUYE AFRIKA!

   LONG LIVE AFRIKA!

   COME BACK AFRIKA!

The African freedom cry--Mayibuye Afrika!--is a touchstone for the volume's cultural politics, and Hughes also uses it to conclude his own introduction to the anthology. The slogan, however, is difficult to translate into English. The innovative double translation that Hughes uses--"Long live Africa! Come back Africa!- appears in an essay in the anthology by Es'kia Mphahlele. In "Accra Conference Diary," Mphahlele explains that "Mayibuye!" is typically translated as "Long live!" but means literally "Come back!" (41). The vibrant militant spirit of this freedom cry is captured in Mphahele's essay, which offers his personal account of the All-African Peoples Conference held in Ghana in 1958, an historic gathering in the development of organized anti-colonial pan-Africanism in the 1960s. The conference ends with Mphahlele's cry: "SATURDAY 13. Full delegations confirm resolutions as above. Tom Mboya gives closing remarks. Dr. Nkrumah is on the platform. The entertainment chief asks us to sing Nkosi Sikelel'i Afrika and Morena Boloka Sechaba. I explain our thumb-raising, pointing to the large map of Africa drawn on the wall, and ask the audience to respond "Mayibuye!" to "Afrika!" (41). Besides the map of Africa, Mphahlele describes wall banners carrying the famous slogans--Nkrumah's "We prefer independence with danger to servitude in tranquility" and Toure's "We prefer independence in poverty to servitude with plenty." Together with Mayibuye Afrika!, these slogans express the anti-colonial nationalist character of the conference as well as of Hughes's anthology.

The very structure of the anthology illuminates the significance of Hughes's late career (re)tutu toward Africa. African Treasury is divided into rive sections: Articles, Miscellaneous, Essays, Stories, Poetry. "Articles" is composed entirely of political essays, including Mphahlele's "Accra Conference Diary." Occupying the first 60 pages of the anthology, the articles take up the key issues and dilemmas faced by African anti-colonial intellectuals, leaders, and movements: the tension that arises with tribal leadership as Nkrumah and Kenyatta--the "men inaugurating the new ways"--try to build a new Africa ("The Blacks" by Peter Abrahams); the plight of women who are "widowed" by the South African migratory labor system that requires their husbands to work far from home ("The Widows of the Reserves" by Phyllis Ntantala); the problems of "democracy" in African nation-building ("Renascent Africa" by Frederick Arkhurst); the dilemmas of exile ("Why I Ran Away" by Bloke Modisane).

As it moves from the framing of key political questions of the day in "Articles" to the daily lives of the African masses in "Miscellaneous" (a collage of popular culture items that includes advice columns and examples of "African Lonely Hearts" personal ads), the anthology's final emphasis is literature. In the third section, "Essays," the reader encounters literary and cultural criticism of the new African arts and culture, with its cross-flows of ancient and modern. With the scene set by criticism, the anthology closes with the presentation of imaginative literature: "Stories," and then "Poetry." With cultural praxis as its goal, the trajectory of the anthology suggests the personal significance that the anthology project held for Hughes. Hughes, who had opened the anthology with the cry "Mayibuye Afrika!" concludes the anthology with a poem by South African poet I. W. W. Citashe, titled, "Weapon":

   Leave the breechloader alone
   And turn to the pen ....

   Your rights are going!
   So pick up your pen,
   Load it, load it with ink.
   Sit in your chair--
   Repair not to Hoho,
   But tire with your pen. (Il.4-5, 8-13)

Here at the end of the anthology, the opening freedom cry has been translated into action taken through the "weapon" of culture. In the anthology project, then, Hughes meditates on the purpose of black literature in a time of African social transformation. This new relationship between black cultural and political revolution is what animates his "dreaming Africa in his sleep." Beginning with the state of the Pan-African polity (the leaders and then the masses in the anthology's first two sections), then moving to the state of Pan-African national culture within it (a third section on literary and cultural criticism), and then closing with the actual practice of that national culture, the anthology drives to redefine black aesthetic praxis for a modern African scene in which anti-colonial resistance and national liberation struggles are re-shaping society. This drive toward political and aesthetic redefinition is also mirrored in Hughes's own work of the period.

The African Treasury project, begun in 1954 and completed in 1960, demarcates Hughes's African (re)turn. This "African Treasury" period becomes the foundation for his more visible political and cultural work in Africa in the 1960s. Without an understanding of this gestational phase, Hughes's 1960's work and his Africa travels tend to be perceived as expressions of opportunism, narcissism, escapism, even the neediness of old age. Instead, the African Treasury project served as a bridge for Hughes into a renewed political identity. Hughes always defined himself as a "social poet," committing his art to his people's struggles for social justice. (10) But the decade leading up to 1954 marked a period of disorientation for Hughes, a loss of his sense of political purpose, his feeling of connection to audience, to social movements. (11) Taking on the African Treasury project in this delicate moment, Hughes found a political rejuvenation in the interweaving of the personal and the political that his work on the anthology brought. Hughes's seemingly incongruous choice of the title "African Treasury" should be understood in this light. The first words of his introduction explain: "This is a very personal treasury--a selection gathered from several thousands of pages of writing by Africans of color that I have read during the past six years" (ix). The anthology is "very personal" because it was no ordinary scholarly or commercial venture. Many of the manuscripts Hughes received were handwritten, many were accompanied by letters from young African writers expressing their gratitude and admiration of Hughes as an elder black writer. The almost nurturing attitude to these emerging writers that Hughes expresses in his introduction reflects his awareness of his role as editor in presenting to US readers the historic birth of a new Africa and a new African voice. (12)

In turn, these writers embraced Hughes. Certainly the rise of the new African nations inspired him, but the friendship and comradeship of this new generation of African writers could not have had a more meaningful influence on the US writer. Through his new relationships to these writers and to their work, Hughes built an intimate aesthetic and intellectual relationship to the forces of anti-colonial revolution that arose in the 1950s. The anthology also served as a kind of crash course, bringing him up to speed in the dizzying but inspiring pace of change in his ancestral homeland, feeding his own drive to rediscover--via African liberation--his role as a cultural fighter for the liberation of his people in the US. In all of these aspects, Hughes's African (re)turn is no different from those of countless Civil Rights movement leaders, intellectuals, and artists whose transformations into black liberation revolutionaries were inspired and mediated by their own African (re)turns. What is striking, however, is that Hughes--like Du Bois and the many other black leftists of their generation who dedicated themselves to radical anti-colonialist work in the 1940s and '50s (13)--anticipated many of his younger peers. (14) This similarity becomes more apparent when we examine other neglected and distorted dimensions of Hughes's work in this African Treasury period.

"What Is this Africa?": The Meaning of African Liberation in America

As Hughes neared the end of his African Treasury immersion, he began to work more publicly to support Africa's freedom struggle. Nineteen-fifty-nine became a pivotal year. (15) Early that year, he took up a central role in the Afro-American Committee for Gifts of Art and Literature to Ghana (with Jean Hutson, Aaron Douglas, Louise Thompson), and he gave a public reading at African Freedom Day celebrations in April. (16) In February with the Mau Mau's on his mind, Hughes addressed his black history month columns in The Defender to the topic of armed black revolt in the US. In the first week of May, Hughes had his character Simple wishing he could take back his African name and heritage. In the very next Defender column, Simple started having his own nationalist "African dreams" in his sleep. These dreams would persist for over a month. (17)

The new, radical nationalist meanings of African liberation seem to have struck to the heart of Hughes's consciousness when he took to the public stage in the first African Freedom Day celebration in New York City on April 15, 1959. Hughes responded so strongly to a speech he heard that day that he included it in his African Treasury, the only text in the anthology not actually composed for an African audience. Titled "African Freedom" and given by Tom Mboya, the speech considers the meaning of the occasion. In answer to the question, "What is this Africa and what do we mean by the word freedom?" Mboya asserts that it is a modernizing Africa that demands the freedom to determine its own identity and destiny: "Africa is no longer willing to be referred to as British, French, Belgian or Portuguese Africa" (30). Declaring that "we shall never compromise" with "colonialism and European domination," Mboya emphasizes that Africa's sovereign right to self-determination is "a birthright which we need not either justify or explain," especially not to those colonialist powers that question "our readiness to shoulder the responsibility of self-government" (34). Mboya further articulates the right to self-determination to include the right of nations to choose socialism: "Too often we have heard of those who insist that African freedom involves the risk of communism. To them, all I want to say is that if they spent all their efforts in practicing the democracy that they preach they would have nothing to fear of communism. Let us therefore, join together and match the internationalism of communism, item by item, with the internationalism of democracy" (34-35).

Mboya's speech is a passionate and militant expression of his identity as a Left, pan-Africanist, Kenyan trade union and independence leader. (18) As such, his emergent African socialism serves Hughes as a bridge between the multinational proletarian focus of his radicalism in the 1930s and the Third World Marxism to which he begins to gravitate through his African turn. But the ideological tire of Mboya's speech is not individual to him; rather, it expresses the militant left-nationalist spirit of the pan-Africanist Conferences at which African Freedom Day had been declared: the Conference of Independent African States and the All-African Peoples' Conference, both held at Ghana in 1958. These conferences, especially the All-African Peoples' Conference, represented an historic project of uniting African nationalist forces across the continent. The beacon of left nationalist unity lit in Accra, Ghana, was noted intently by Hughes at the beginning of 1959 as it fired a radical shift in black struggles in the US. (19) The upsurge of African nationalism signaled in these conferences was met enthusiastically not only by the prominent US black delegates who attended (including Horace Mann Bond, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Maida Springer of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union) but also by the US black press. (20) In 1959, Hughes began writing Defender columns that shared this domestic embrace of Africa's new spirit of militancy.

"If You Turn Too Many Cheeks, You Wan't [sic] Have No Cheek Left"

In 1959, the burgeoning Civil Rights movement was confronting a violent white counterattack that had emerged in response to the first legal victories of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, and the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The counterattack included the immediate formation of supremacist White Citizens' Councils in 1954, the upsurge of lynchings (Emmett Till in 1955), bombings (Birmingham church bombings begin in 1957), assassinations (Rev. George Lee in 1955), and the repressive mobilization of state security apparatuses by entrenched southern governors (Faubus in 1957). In response, black people began turning to militancy. In 1957, Robert Williams began organizing armed black self-defense units in Monroe and confronting white mobs and police. (21) The Nation of Islam began making in-roads into northern urban ghettos. And young militants prepared to launch a confrontational new tactic--sit-ins--chanting "Freedom Now!" (22)

In spite of these new developments, in 1959 the established leadership of the Civil Rights movement in the NAACP celebrated their organization s 50th anniversary declaring that it was on track in its campaign to have everyone "Freeby '63." (23) But rising anti-colonial struggles in Africa challenged their schedule and their reassurances: "Then there is the matter of Africa: hardly a week passes that the awakening giant's cries for "Freedom" don't ring out over the radio and television into the ears of American Negroes--ashamed, as they most certainly are, that they are still not free" (Lomax 505). Editorials in the Chicago Defender reflect this sentiment, particularly in relation to Ghana. As Hughes would explain in his Defender Africa series in August: "Today the eyes of the world are on Ghana because it is considered a test as to whether native Africans can make a success of self-government.... What happens in Ghana in the near future will influence the history of all of Africa" (Untitled, 15 Aug. 1959, 10).

"The country [Ghana]," Ronald Walters has observed, "was a symbol for the aspirations of many peoples of African descent for the future viability of the continent" (101). In the US, Nkrumah had a special significance to African Americans:

   Perhaps the most important reason [they were drawn to him] besides
   the sheer drama of independence was the perception by many that
   Nkrumah was a kindred soul, having been in the United States,
   studied the works of Du Bois, Garvey and other Black intellectuals,
   studied the condition of the Black community itself, and shared the
   pain of American racism.... Nkrumah's first visit to the United
   States as a new head of state occurred in late July of 1958. A
   typical newspaper headline describing the wildly enthusiastic
   reception by Black Americans said, "Harlem Hails Ghanaian Leader as
   Returning Hero." On July 27, his twenty-five-car motorcade was met
   by ten thousand cheering people on Seventh Avenue in Harlem and as
   the parade reached the Armory at 143rd St and Fifth Avenue there
   were a reported 7,500 "cheering persons packed inside." (Walters
   97-98)

After featuring in January two weeks of enthusiastic coverage of the All-African Peoples' Conference in Ghana, the paper began placing criticisms of established domestic leadership alongside energetic embraces of African struggle.

A cycle from February begins in the same issue in which the NAACP's triumphant anniversary is proclaimed. On February 14, the Defender ran an article headlined, "NAACP Observes 50 Years of Fighting for Rights: On Threshold of Complete Victory." In the editorial of that issue, however, the paper critiqued "a leadership which at time [sic] ... was willing to compromise the race's indivisible rights for personal gains": "Too long have we been willing to accept half a loaf of the full measure of rights denied us. We have been suppliant at the foot of the temple for so long a time that our status has become that of mendicants" ("Struggle for Full Citizenship" 10). Two weeks later, an editorial sharply contrasts the traditional domestic leadership (with the slogan Free by '63) with the determined revolutionary drive in Africa (Freedom Now!):

   The Africans are rapidly shaking off the yoke of colonial
   exploitation from their necks. The unfree segments of the black
   man's land want freedom now, they want to be self-governing, they
   want to be their own masters in their own land; and they are
   willing to spill their precious blood as a measure of sacrifice for
   the cause of African freedom. These people are on the march and
   nothing can stop them short of their goal. ("The Age of
   Exploitation Is Over" 10)

Directly below the editorial, in a letter to the editor, a reader embraces the emergence of more radical leadership both within and beyond the NAACP:

   The past History has taught us the sad lesson of trying to wait for
   justice to come peacefully. I feel that many of our parents are
   sleeping in their graves who waited and waited for integration,
   freedom and justice to come. Thank God that we now have a larger
   number of militant Negro leaders who realize that if you want
   something you must join the struggle and not just sit and wait.
   (Evans 10)

In this same month, Hughes responds to the example of African militancy not only by urging the pan-Africanist cultural reclamation (for example, Africans "taking back" their African names) that has been touted by Hughes scholars, but also by pairing the cultural move with radical political action that scholars have neglected. (24)

Although Simple's well-known "Let's Take Back Our African Names" (7 Feb. 1959) has been collected and republished individually, it is actually the first of a three-part series that Hughes devotes to "Negro History Week." (25) In the uncollected second column, "Great Words from Negro History" (14 Feb. 1959), Hughes reprints a range of short quotes that features a sharp revolutionary chord:

      DAVID WALKER: I ask you, had you not rather be killed than to be
   a slave to a tyrant? It is no more harm for you to kill a man who
   is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water
   when thirsty....

      FREDERICK DOUGLASS: The doctrine that submission to violence is
   the best cure for violence did not hold as good as between slave
   and overseers. He was whipped oftener who was whipped easiest....

      JOHN BROWN: I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes
   of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I
   had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without much
   bloodshed it might be done. (10)

In the uncollected closing column, "Simple On Negro History Week" (21 Feb. 1959), Hughes has his friend carry these lessons of history into the present by meditating on what armed African struggle means for blacks in the US South. Simple describes hearing a corner soapbox speaker talk of the righteousness of the Mau Mau struggle in Kenya and its relevance to the US South. When Hughes disagrees and urges non-violent, electoral tactics in America--"The vote, not violence, should be our program here" and "The Bible says turn the other cheek"--Simple flatly rebuts: "You cannot turn neither one cheek nor the other with a bullet in your head.... In the Mau Mau country, there must have been too many black cheek-turners, because the white man has ruled with an iron hand in Africa too long" (10). He emphasizes that Negro History Week "should be a time to remember all them that resisted slavery and fought against bondage": Frederick Douglas who "struck his master down," Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, John Brown, and other "great names that riz up ..., and started revolts, and scared the living daylights out of white folks" (10). Inspired by the corner speaker's message, Simple closes the series of three columns with the poem he wrote as "a motto" for the week:

   IT BEING NEGRO HISTORY WEEK
   DO NOT TURN THE OTHER CHEEK
   GET HEP TO YOURSELF--
   IF YOU TURN TOO MANY CHEEKS
   YOU WAN'T HAVE NO CHEEK LEFT

Early in 1959, then, Hughes began responding to the call of anti-colonial African nationalism by moving with the US black masses to challenge the political commitment and vision of established, moderate Civil Rights leadership. Hughes engaged directly with the emerging debate about the effectiveness of nonviolence as a tactic in the face of violent white resistance. (26) Through his Simple columns, he opened his writing not only to the cultural dimensions of nationalism but to the rising tactical militancy of black peoples in Africa and at home. This trend in Hughes's work would only deepen in the second half of the year as he engaged, through the black press, with the nationalist spirit and program of the Accra Conference and its African Freedom Day.

Dreaming a "Second Reconstruction"

As 1959 unfolded, Africa's vanguard role became clearer, and the Defender editors realized the historic importance of the Accra conference of December 1958. Three months after their January coverage of the event, they published a long editorial marking the Accra Conference as the birth of a new era, remarking: "The African world, seething with nationalist revolutions, has at last convinced its colonial masters that it means business. Africa is pursuing with unflagging vigor the resolve of the All-African Peoples' Conference ... ("The All-African People's Conference" 10).

From here, the editorial summarizes the aspects of political program addressed at the conference--"strategy and tactics in relation to colonialism and imperialism." It notes internal contradictions of "tribalism" (whose propagators are "black agents of the imperialists") and the external threat of the colonial "divide and rule" tactic. The editors emphasize this clarity of strategy--"nothing ... has been more significant than this program for African freedom," and they close with a materialist analysis of political stakes: "This is matter of great moment, for Africa is a land of enormous potential wealth, the natural source of Europe's tropical raw materials and foodstuffs." Sustaining a slogan modeled after the Communist Manifesto, the final lines of the editorial make clear the convergence of Marxism and African nationalism that Mboya would echo in his speech for African Freedom Day: "The world must know that the all African People's Conference ended on this note: 'Peoples of Africa, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! You have a continent to regain! You have freedom and human dignity to attain!'" (10).

One month later, the Defender's editorial staff did not miss a beat in recognizing the significance of "Africa Freedom Day" celebrations in Chicago as a "solemn reminder" of the dawn of a new African era:

   After centuries of oppression, dismemberment and isolation,
   Africans are now wresting their destiny from the hands of
   colonialists, and are surging forth with an acceleration that
   bewilders the white world.... The tides have changed, and the world
   is now witnessing a phenomenal, self-assertive African nationalism
   that neither historians nor politicians of the West seem able to
   explain.... Africans are no longer on their knees pleading to an
   unjust colonial god for their freedom, they are taking it. ("Africa
   Freedom Day" 10)

Hughes, too, was moved as he shared the stage with Tom Mboya for the Africa Freedom Day celebrations in New York City. Hughes responded not only by selecting Mboya's speech for his African Treasury (again, rendering it the only text in the volume not originally published or presented in Africa), but Hughes once again carried forward inspiration from the African liberation movement into his Defender columns.

In his Defender column the very next week, Hughes had Simple take up the spirit of this "self-assertive" African nationalism by repeating his wish to replace his slave name with an "African Mohamemedan Ali Baba name" to express his "race pride" (Untitled, 2 May 1959, 10). When Simple had wished in February that we could "take out African names back," he carried that cultural impulse forward into a call for armed self-defense. But this rime, Simple's nationalist impulse carries forward--and to the left--into a much more expansive political vision, indeed, into political program. Until now, Hughes scholarship has provided a limited view of Simple's pan-Africanism and black nationalism, emphasizing a narrower cultural mode while blocking out the deeper-cutting political dimension. In an unexamined and uncollected series of rive dreams from May to June, Simple translates African nationalism into a satiric dream of an American South that is governed by its black majority. (27) Black people have "taken over" the South and have reversed the tables on Jim Crow. Blacks hold all the best jobs and Adam Powell is president. Whites are now relegated to the lowest and servant classes. White mammies serve black families, and "miscegenation" is defined as the immoral corruption of black bloodlines by inferior white lineages. Much of the humor in these columns lies in the come-uppance dealt to southern white supremacists in the inversion of roles--ardent white supremacist Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge becomes "Uncle Tom Talmadge" and the notorious Governor Faubus of Arkansas has his mother turned--dozens style--into a house servant, "Won't white folks ever learn to know their place? Mammy Faubus, bring me a julep!" (28) Much mirth comes from ridiculing the "oppressed" whites as being so ill-equipped to cope with racism because of the bankruptcy and poverty of their own culture and heritage that they can only mimic black cultures of survival and resistance. They appropriate, for instance, the NAACP as the "National Association for the Advancement of Caucasian People" and sing hack spirituals:

   SWING LOW,
   SWEET INTEGRATED CHARIOT
   COMING FOR TO
   INTEGRATE MY HOME ("Simple Dreams Some Dreams" 10)

But Simple makes clear that the subjugation of these whites is not comparable to the oppression of black people under Jim Crow. In this period after "the second reconstruction," segregation is necessary "for different reasons" ("A Mint Julep, Mammy Faubus," 23 May 1959). Whites, unlike blacks, were actually treated as equals until they proved themselves too selfish and lazy to be worthy of such equality:

   Lord, I wonder what are we going to do with these crackers wanting
   equality with Negroes? When they had it back in Eisenhower's day,
   they did not know what to do with it--abused it, played golf all
   the rime, drank Coca Colas, whooped and hollered at the Sugar Bowl
   game. Now that they got to work for us, colored, who have took over
   the South, they start organizing white NAACP's.... ("Uncle Talmadge
   Cuts Hog" 10)

And, unlike blacks under Jim Crow, whites truly deserve to be at the bottom, since, as Simple reminds Mammy Faubus, "You white folks have no background going back to Chakah in Nigeria. Your forefathers were not sages in Benin. You cannot trace your grandma to the Congo, that mighty river flowing with history!" ("A Mint Julep, Mammy Faubus" 10).

For all its satiric exaggeration, the core premise of these dreams--the proud rise of a Black Nation in the South--is both radical and timely. In essence, it revives the Black Belt Nation thesis put forward by the Comintern in the late 1920s at the same time as it rearticulates that thesis into the African nationalist discourses of cultural pride and political and economic self-determination that were emerging in 1959. (29) Over the course of his African (re)turn, Hughes began explicitly to link the struggle of black people in the US to the radical anti-colonial nationalisms rising among the black peoples of Africa. Though I have focused on Hughes's editorial work and prose, this trajectory is no less remarkable in his poetry, though it, too, has been largely obscured by extant Hughes scholarship.

New Stride in Your Thighs: Poetry of the African (Re)Turn

Karen Jackson Ford has argued that, as a poet, Hughes was out of place in the black nationalist 1960s, "at best ambivalent in the new, more aggressive political climate" (283). Ford reserves her sharpest cynicism for Hughes's final collection, The Panther and the Lash: "Hughes's last volume of poetry tells us a great deal about making poetry pay. In 1966, he and Knopf thought the time was right for a book of militant poetry; however, he clearly did not have enough new poems for a volume. Even the ones he had were weak and hesitant about the 1960s. So he bolstered them with older poems" (290). According to Ford, "the most militant poetry in it was written in the 1930s" (289), yet even that poetry seems "belated, nostalgic and out of step with the times" (285). The Panther and the Lash, Ford argues, should put to rest our attempts to define Hughes as anything but "capricious, changeful, uncertain, contradictory" (293-94). But the full record of Hughes's work and working relationships strongly rebuts Ford's characterization of his final period as a collection of half-hearted attempts by an aging poet, hopelessly lagging, to catch up with and profit opportunistically from a new political momentum among his people. While it is important to recognize that Hughes was cautious--at times, to a fault--about expressing his political commitment after being subjected to McCarthyism in the 1950s, the poetry of Hughes's African (re)turn (1954-1960) only confirms that in the 1950s the poet placed himself at the leading edge of emergent black nationalist debates and discourse. (30) In particular, Hughes composed and published poems very early that registered the powerful impact that African decolonization--and Third World liberation--would have on the African American political imagination of the 1960s.

Hughes began embracing the new promise of African liberation in 1952--a year before he would be summoned before the McCarthy Committee--in the poem "Africa":

   Sleepy giant,
   You've been resting awhile....
   Now I see
   The storm clouds
   In your waking eyes:
   The thunder,
   The wonder,
   And the young
   Surprise.
   Your every step reveals
   The new stride
   In your thighs. (ll. 1-2, 6-15

In 1955, Hughes began composing poems about the solidarity between the African American freedom struggle and Third World liberation movements. In "In Explanation of Our Times," Hughes captured the anti-imperialist spirit of that year's Bandung Conference: "The folks with no titles In front of their names / all over the world / are raring up and talking back" (ll. 1-3). Oppressed people from "Dixie to Singapore, Cape Town to Hong Kong" are called "George Sallie Coolie Indian Boy." They are "black brown yellow bent down working / earning riches for the whole world," and they are tired of being denied liberty and democracy (ll. 10, 52-53). Now, when told to "Shut up!" they resist: "No shut up! / Hell no shut up!" (ll. 56-57). In 1957, Hughes selected these two poems to be published in Africa South, a radical South African anti-apartheid journal edited by Ronald Segal (himself later exiled from South Africa because of his political views). For that issue, he also selected "Memo to Non-White Peoples'. In this new poem, Hughes warns oppressed people to understand the manifestations of neocolonialism in all the ghettos of the world:

   They will gleefully let you
   Kill your damn self any way you choose
   With liquor, drugs, or whatever.

   It's the same from Cairo to Chicago,
   Cape Town to the Caribbean. (ll. 12-16)

That same year, Hughes placed two poems with an important publishing history. The first poem was "So?," a poem with an uncompromising militant tone that Gwendolyn Brooks would praise in 1975 for its rejection of the integrationist desire to sit at "the table" as the "darker brother," wanting "them" to see how beautiful he is. The entire poem reads:

   I could tell you,
   If I wanted to,
   What makes me
   What I am.

   But I don't
   Really want to--
   And you don't
   Give a damn. (31)

The second poem was "African Question Mark":

   Don't know why I now
   Must turn Mau Mau
   And lift my hand
   Against my fellow man
   To live in my own land.

   But it is so.... (32) (ll. 6-11, 12)

Both of these poems--hardly weak, hesitant, or nostalgic--were eventually collected in The Panther and the Lash. But more importantly, Hughes also selected these poems for republication in Black Orpheus, one of the three most influential avant-garde journals of the new Africa (alongside Transition and Drum). He selected these poems for African readers in 1959, the same year that Simple takes the side of the Mau Mau's and of armed (rather than nonviolent) African American resistance, not to mention dreaming of a Black Nation in the South. In the diasporic range typical of Black Orpheus, Hughes's work in the issue represents African America and appears alongside poems by Senghor and Soyinka as well as work by two Caribbean writers: Andrew Salkey and Samuel Selvon. But it is with the poetry of young Senegalese David Diop that Hughes's work shares the most poignant connection in the issue. Diop's poem "Africa" complements Hughes's poem of the same title. Bore in France, Diop was engaged in his own African (re)turn:

   Africa, my Africa
   Africa of proud warriors in ancestral Savannahs ...
   I have never known you
   But your blood flows in my veins ...
   Africa, tell me Africa
   Is this you, this back that is bent
   This back that breaks
   Under the weight of humiliation
   This back trembling with red scars
   And saying yes to the whip under the midday sun? (ll. 1-2, 5-6,
   11-16)

Where Hughes fraternally admires decolonizing Africa as a waking "sleepy giant" with "a new stride in your thighs," Diop is also given a renascent vision in response to his question:

   But a grave voice answers me:
   Impetuous son, this tree, young and strong
   This tree there,
   In splendid isolation amidst white and faded flowers
   That is Africa, your Africa,
   That grows again, patiently, obstinately
   And its fruit gradually acquire
   The bitter taste of liberty. (33) (ll. 17-24)

Neocolonialism, Black Nationalism, and a New Poetics of Africa

Hughes's efforts at bridging the revolutionary anti-colonial struggles of black people in Africa and in the US grew only stronger in his subsequent poetry. Ask Your Mama (1961) is the most substantial example but even "Junior Addict," a short, little-studied poem, captures the radical yet unacknowledged shift in Hughes's poetic representations of Africa between his early and late career. (34) Hughes's first evocations of Africa in his emblematic 1921 poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"--with its "ancient, dusky" Euphrates, Congo and Nile--are familiar to many (23), but his urgent call for a new "sunrise out of Africa" some 40 years later in "Junior Addict" may shock:

   The little boy
   who sticks a needle in his arm
   and seeks an out in other worldly dreams,
   who seeks an out in eyes that droop
   and ears that close to Harlem screams,
   cannot know, of course,
   (and has no way to understand)
   a sunrise that he cannot see
   beginning In some other land--
   but destined sure to flood--and soon--
   the very room in which he leaves
   his needle and spoon....

   Yes, [it's] easier to get dope
   than to get a job--
   day time or night time job,
   teenage, pre-draft,
   pre-life job.

   Quick, sunrise, come!
   Sunrise out of Africa,
   Quick come!
   Sunrise, please come!
   Come! Come! (ll. 1-12, 30-39)

Instead of the early poem's mythic scene, infused with ancient African grandeur and dignity, the later poem vaults us into a modern urban ghetto in which that mythic Africa seems virtually inaccessible, even foreign. In this American scene, the figure of Africa--the sunrise--is unfamiliar and must rise as a new dawn for the ghetto young. The emphasis is not on the past but on present crisis, on youth, with the future at stake. The ghetto youth cannot draw on the timeless pan-African connection of "I've known rivers ancient as the world." Unlike the speaker of the early poem who has "known rivers ancient as the world," the youth of the later poem "cannot see," "has no way to understand," and "cannot know" this "sunrise out of Africa." This new Africa flooding towards him does not reside deep "like the rivers" in his soul but is instead "beginning in some other land."

The source of this sharp change in Hughes's semiotics of Africa is the anti-colonial, pan-Africanist and radical nationalist politics of Hughes's African (re)turn. The "sunrise out of Africa" is new and foreign--"beginning in some other land'--because it is a radically new Africa that rises. This revolutionary, decolonizing Africa is more than a set of cultural roots for black identity. The African cry for freedom is a nationalist cry for economic and political self-determination, and it guides US black people toward a deep material solution to their structural entrapment (economic marginalization) in 1960s America, particularly in urban ghettoes. This revolutionary new meaning of Africa for US black people becomes clear when we trace the poem into its publishing context.

Hughes first published "Junior Addict" in the journal of the Liberation Committee for Africa, The Liberator. (35) The Liberator was from its first issue in 1961 to its last issue in 1971 "a platform for black nationalism" (Johnson and Johnson 173). Hughes published his poem in April of 1963, the year of the Emancipation Centennial. As editor Daniel Watts explains in the January issue, the Centennial would mark not the success but the failure of legal reforms in truly liberating black people:

   The Centennial speeches will tell us how much "progress" has been
   made--how many places we can now buy a cup of coffee, how many
   classrooms have been integrated, how many appointments have been
   made by President Kennedy and how many voters have been registered.
   It is, however, only a comfortable delusion to think all that is
   needed is more coffee, integration, appointments and votes and then
   one morning we will wake up and find ourselves free. Racism and jim
   crow are such basic ingredients of the American way of life that
   they will not be eliminated without major surgery. (2)

This "major surgery" can only be carried out through a black nationalism that unites Africa and black America:

   The movements in Africa and America have developed along separate
   but parallel lines.... The difference in conditions and tactics on
   either side of the ocean are less significant than that
   similarities and the existence of a common enemy. Unity is a
   prerequisite for final victory. LIBERATOR is dedicated to
   uncompromising participation in the liberation struggle both in
   America and in Africa, thus serving as a bridge for unity between
   the two movements which must eventually become one. (2)

One of the ways that the journal served as "a bridge for unity" was to advance the theory that black people in the US faced the same systemic political and economic oppression that subjugated African peoples: neo-colonialism. Hughes's "Junior Addict" originates in precisely this political view, though it has been obscured.

Rampersad provides only the following note concerning the poem's appearance in The Liberator: "This poem is inspired by the Mario Jorrin photo in the article on NARCOTICS in the February 1964 LIBERATOR." But by tracking the poem back into the pages of The Liberator, it becomes immediately clear that this is not the full story. The large photo that inspires Hughes's poem (36) comes from an article that has the full title, "Narcotics in the Ghetto: Neo-Colonialism at Home." This article provides a structural, Third World Marxist explanation (neo-colonization) for the drug "plague" in Harlem:

   [D]ope addiction will increase as long as the government tolerates
   the exploitation of a segment of its people. For the dope plague is
   especially intense in a community which is restrictively Negro, and
   it is the direct result of neo-colonization of the Negro in urban
   areas of the North. (Finkenstaedt 12)

Harlem's drug problem is a systemic problem faced by black people across the North--there is a Harlem-like ghetto in every Northern city" (37)--and it is caused by the same historical processes that created the neocolonial ghetto conditions on which "dope addiction breeds': the economic degradation of the black family, (38) legal and illegal economic exploitation and dispossession, racist law enforcement (13-14). (39) The dope plague is but one aspect of the underlying problem of the ghetto, which itself is a product of the same neocolonialism that oppresses black people in Africa. (40) Hughes published "Junior Addict" only two issues after this article as a direct response to its bridging of the US ghetto drug plague and its neocolonialist base. His poem is the first piece in the issue, appearing dramatically on a full page alongside the Jorrin photo reprinted from February. Making a powerful statement, Hughes's poem envisions that the "sunrise" of African economic and political self-determination can free US black youths from the plagues (dope) and prisons (ghettos) of neocolonialism and restore the economic vitality of black communities in the US.

Implications

In this essay, I have taken a first step in the task of recovering Hughes's African (re)turn in the 1950s. The recovery of individual texts and contexts remains a key task. For example, the remarkable 1959 Defender columns that I have referenced here perhaps shine less brightly than do Hughes's own ten-column journalistic series on decolonizing Africa, composed from July through September 1959. It is time for scholars to study the two consecutive months of his column that Hughes devoted to educating the popular black readers in the US about the militant anti-colonial nationalisms of the peoples of Africa. (41)

At the same time, the recovery of Hughes's African (re)turn raises three larger projects. First, the poetics of Hughes's later period demands its own reassessment. How does the political transformation of Hughes's African (re)turn relate to developments in his later style and poetics? For instance, Hughes is still considered to have been a populist poet. In defending Hughes's "plain style" against "High Modernism" (4), Steven Tracy identifies "the Hughes aesthetic" as "the plain, the simple, the vernacular" (5). Yet in 1961 Hughes published Ask Your Mama. Part musical score, part drama, part poetry, part critical prose, and composed in a hard-edged jazz poetics--this breathtaking experiment in pan-African "Cultural Exchange" needs additional attention in Hughes scholarship. What scholarship exists has not yet registered the connection between Hughes's experimentalist poetics and his African (re)turn: that the framing device of the long poem--invoking the "Colored Hour," the revolutionary imagination and its dream of the black nation--originates in Hughes's "Simple" columns of 1959. (42)

The second project is the archival investigation of Hughes's profile and reception within different sectors of the Black Arts Movement at different times. Smethurst suggests a rich terrain of future inquiry into the nature of Hughes's role as a bridge between the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and '70s and the earlier radicalisms of the 1930s and 1940s: "Hughes tirelessly promoted the careers of young (and sometimes not so young) militant black artists then, providing practical, moral, and emotional support and encouragement. At the same time, Hughes constructively criticized both the new black writing and the responses of some of the artists, activists and intellectuals of his generation ..." ("Don't Say Goodbye" 1225). (43) Hughes's African (re)turn raises the question of how the politics of African anti-colonialism and nationalism mediated his relationship to both the younger and elder generations as well as their relationship to each other. Penny Von Eschen has argued that "Cold War repression and historical amnesia" created a "deep fissure" between the black anticolonialisms of the 1940s and the '60s such that, in the 1960s, "young activists such as members of the Black Panthers and SNCC were cut off from an older generation and compelled to reinvent the wheel ..." (187). Hughes's African (re)turn represents an opportunity to revisit this fissure to consider what survived its crossing.

Third, Hughes's African (re)turn requires that we rethink his political radicalism from the ground up. Recent work on Hughes's radicalism has focused overwhelmingly on recovering the "proletarian" radicalism of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet the politics of Hughes's African (re)turn of 1954-60 suggest a second equally important vector of black radicalism--anti-colonialism, nationalism--that demands its own consideration. (44) Although we must be careful not to reduce Hughes's radicalism to an opposition between an "early" proletarian radicalism and a "later" black nationalism, we must contend squarely with the reality that in his last decades Hughes was responding to breakthroughs in anti-colonial national liberation struggles that themselves were raising fundamental challenges to earlier (Western) Marxist theories of revolution. (45) The late period of Hughes's work provides a special opportunity to revisit the historic tensions, divergences, and convergences between the "black" and the "red"--between class struggle and the struggle for national liberation--in US black radicalisms. (46)

To recover Hughes's African (re)turn (1954-1960) is to dispel some of the powerful stories that have obscured the tremendous arc of his life as a revolutionary black writer and intellectual, especially in his last decades of work. In 1953, his encounter with McCarthyism did not cause him to shrink back from the political radicalism of his youth. Instead of retreating inward, Hughes rechanneled and renewed his commitment by embracing the passion and clear-eyed determination of his brothers and sisters fighting in Africa and the Third World to liberate themselves from empire and, in so doing, to reshape the world. He did not follow Black Power; he anticipated its anti-colonial nationalism and pan-Africanism. He certainly had weaknesses and vulnerabilities that resulted in disappointing failures, error. But the last decades of his life were not fogged by fantasies of self-fulfillment or enrichment. He did not use his age as an excuse to withdraw to a safe distance. He was neither a spectator nor a mild-mannered, genteel supporter of African American freedom struggles. He took up the pen as a weapon and returned again and again to the frontlines of culture--as a poet, an author, an editor, a journalist--with tireless grace and love for his people in the US and throughout the black world.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I would like to thank Cheryl Higashida, Jim Smethurst, and Vincent Woodward for their criticisms and comments.

Works Cited

Abrahams, Peter. "The Blacks." Hughes, African Treasury 42-55.

"Africa Freedom Day." Editorial. Chicago Defender 25 Apr. 1959, weekend ed.: 10.

"The Age of Exploitation Is Over." Editorial. Chicago Defender 28 Feb. 1959, weekend ed.: 10.

"The All-African People's Conference" Editorial. Chicago Defender 21 Mat. 1959, weekend ed.: 10.

Arkhurst, Frederick. "Renascent Africa." Hughes, African Treasury 56-63.

Asgill, Eddie Omotayo. "Langston Hughes and Africa." Of Dreams Deferred, Dead or Alive: African Perspectives on African-American Writers. Ed. Femi Ojo-Ade. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1996. 43-51.

Bertschman, Don. "Jesse B. Simple and the Racial Mountain: A Bibliographic Essay." The Langston Hughes Review 13.2 (1995): 29-44.

Brooks, Gwendolyn, et al. A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing. Detroit: Broadside P, 1975.

Citashe, I. W. W. "Weapon." Hughes, African Treasury 203.

Clarke, John Henrik. Harlem, A Community in Transition. New York: Citadel, 1964.

Dawahare, Anthony. "Langston Hughes's Radical Poetry and the 'End of Race.'" MELUS 23.3 (Fall 1998): 21-41.

de Braganca, Aquino, and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds. The African Liberation Reader: Documents of the National Liberation Movements. 3 vols. London: Zed P, 1982.

de Jongh, James. "The Poet Speaks of Places: A Close Reading of Langston Hughes' Literary Use of Places." Tracy 65-84.

Diop, David. "Africa." Diop, Coups de Pilon 25.

--. Coups de Pilon. 1956. Eds. and Trans. Simon Mpondo and Frank Jones. London: Heinemann, 1975.

--. "To a Black Child." Diop, Coups de Pilon 27.

Duffy, Susan. The Political Plays of Langston Hughes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000.

Evans, Webb. Letter. "Militant Leadership." Chicago Defender 28 Feb. 1959, weekend ed.: 10.

Finkenstaedt, Rose L. H. "Narcotics in the Ghetto." The Liberator 3.2 (1963): 12-14.

Ford, Karen Jackson. "Making Poetry Pay: The Commodification of Langston Hughes." Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading. Eds. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, P. 1996. 275-96.

Harper, Donna Akiba Sullivan. Not So Simple: The "Simple" Stories of Langston Hughes. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1995.

--, ed. The Return of Simple. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.

Hughes, Langston. An African Treasury: Articles/Essays/Stories/Poems by Black Africans. 1960. Ed. Langston Hughes. New York: Pyramid, 1968.

--. Arna Bontemps--Langston Hughes Letters, 1925-1967. Ed. Charles H. Nichols. New York: Paragon, 1980.

--. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Vintage, 1994.

--. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Vol. 9: Essays on Art, Race, Politics and World Affairs. Ed. Christopher C. De Santis. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002.

--. "Great Words from Negro History" Chicago Defender 14 Feb. 1959, weekend ed.: 10.

--. "'If I Was President,' Says Simple" Chicago Defender 21 Mar. 1959, weekend ed.: 10.

--. "Junior Addict." Collected Poems 539.

--. "Let's Take Back Out African Names." Chicago Defender 7 Feb. 1959, weekend ed.: 10.

--. "A Mint Julep, Mammy Faubus." Chicago Defender 23 May 1959, weekend ed.: 10.

--. "Simple Dreams Some Dreams." Chicago Defender 9 May 1959, weekend ed.: 10.

--. "Simple On Negro History Week." Chicago Defender 21 Feb. 1959, weekend ed.: 10.

--. "Uncle Talmadge Cuts Hog." Chicago Defender 16 May 1959, weekend ed.: 10.

--. Untitled. Chicago Defender 2 May 1959, weekend ed.: 10.

--. Untitled. Chicago Defender 15 Aug. 1959, weekend ed.: 10.

--. Untitled. New York Post 21 May 1965: n.p.

--. "We, Too." Collected Works 248-49.

Jemie, Onwuchekwa. Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1976.

Johnson, Abby Arthur, and Ronald Maberry Johnson. Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1979.

Kim, Daniel won-gu. "'An Aggressive Concept of the Popular': Avant-garde Poetics and U.S. Social Movements." Book manuscript.

--. "From Light in the Soviet Union to Sunrise Out of Africa: Recovering the Radicalism of Langston Hughes' African (Re)Turn, 1954-1960." American Studies Association Conference. Oakland Convention Center, Oakland, CA. 12 Oct. 2006.

Lomax, Louis E. "A Demand for Dynamic Leadership." The Black American: a Documentary History. Eds. Leslie Fisher, Jr., and Benjamin Quarles. New York: William Morrow, 1970. 502-07.

Mboya, Tom. "African Freedom." Hughes, African Treasury 30-35.

Modisane, Bloke. "Why I Ran Away." Hughes, African Treasury 26-29.

Mphahlele, Es'kia. "Accra Conference Diary: The All-African People's Conference, Accra, Ghana, December 8, 1958." Hughes, African Treasury 36-41.

Munck, Ronaldo. The Difficult Dialogue: Marxism and Nationalism. London: Zed Books, 1986.

Ntantala, Phyllis. "The Widows of the Reserves." Hughes, African Treasury 20-25.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II: 1941-1967, I Dream a World. New York: Oxford UP, 2002.

Richards, Yevette. Maida Springer: Pan-Africanist and International Labor Leader. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2004.

Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 1983. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000.

Smethurst, James. "The Adventures of a Social Poet: Langston Hughes from the Popular Front to Black Power." Tracy 141-68.

--. "'Don't Say Goodbye to the Porkpie Hat': Langston Hughes, the Left, and the Black Arts Movement." Callaloo 25.4 (2002): 1225-36.

--. The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

--. "Poetry and Sympathy: New York, the Left, and the Rise of Black Arts." Left of the Color Line: Race Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States. Eds. Bill Mullen and James Smethurst. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2003.

"Struggle for Full Citizenship." Editorial. Chicago Defender 14 Feb. 1959, weekend ed.: 10. Thurston, Michael. "Black Christ, Red Flag: Langston Hughes on Scottsboro." College Literature 22.3 (1995): 30-49.

--. "Bombed in Spain: Langston Hughes, the Black Press, and the Spanish Civil War." The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Todd Vogel. New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers UP, 2001.

Tracy, Steven, ed. A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes. London: Oxford UP, 2004.

--. Introduction. Tracy, Historical Guide 3-22.

Von Eschen, Penny M. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997.

Walters, Ronald. Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora: An Analysis of Modern Afrocentric Political Movements. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993.

Notes

(1.) The scholarship recovering Hughes's radical writing of the 1930s includes Smethurst's "Adventures of a Social Poet: Langston Hughes in the 1930s"; Thurston's "Bombed in Spain" and "Black Christ, Red Flag: Langston Hughes on Scottsboro"; Duffy's The Political Plays of Langston Hughes, a scholarly edition of Hughes's agitprop labor plays of the '30s; Dawahare's "Langston Hughes's Radical Poetry and the 'End of Race.'" The prominent inclusion of Hughes's 1930's revolutionary poetry and prose in the recently published collected works is a strong indication of the success of these recovery efforts.

(2.) Rampersad's biography is a prominent example.

(3.) Smethurst documents this trend in "Adventures of a Social Poet: Langston Hughes from the Popular Front to Black Power."

(4.) I am indebted to Smethurst, who has led the way in recovering the radicalism of Hughes's later period, especially by delineating the continuities between the earlier and later radicalisms. With its careful historicizations, its re-reading of collected Simple stories, and its archival work in Hughes's papers, "Don't Say Goodbye to the Porkpie Hat: Langston Hughes, the Left, and the Black Arts Movement" was instrumental in forming the approach I have taken here. By recovering a temporally broader range of Hughes's radical Africa-oriented work from the 1950s, this essay deepens Smethurst's central thesis by arguing that the African (re)turn in Hughes's post-McCarthy-Committee work (including as an editor and as "cultural catalyst") places him even more clearly in an unacknowledged and under-theorized bridging the Black Arts Movement and Black Nationalisms of the 1960s and 1970s with the radicalisms of the 1930s and 1940s. In the first chapter of his The Black Arts Movement, "Foreground and Underground: The Left, Nationalism and the Origins of the Black Arts Matrix," Smethurst maps the much broader continuities-the many other "bridge" figures besides Hughes-between the black radicalisms of the '30s, '40s, and '50s with the black radicalisms of the '60s and '70s.

(5.) Jemie has observed that a new poetics of a new Africa emerges in Hughes's later work. Africa seems "so much closer, ... so much more real in Ask Your Mama and The Panther and the Lash, than, for instance, in The Weary Blues or One-Way Ticket' (125). But Hughes's African (re)turn shows that he had begun bringing the new Africa out of his dreams and "closer" to reality well before-his final two collections of poetry (1961, 1967). Jemie's underlying thesis is that Hughes's later poetry was tuned to the black militancy of the '60s via a new "Third World awareness" (125). He argues that in the 1950s, Hughes had "beat a tactical retreat ... from the broad-based multiracial Marxist workers' platform" (123) that he had embraced in the '30s and '40s. "No, he has not given up the dream [of revolution] but he is beginning to look elsewhere (away from white America, whether workers or liberal Northerners) for sources for fulfilling it. The hope (distant, but nevertheless a hope) is in the emerging modern powers of the African homeland, and in China; in other words, in a gathering of Third World forces ..." (126). Jemie very usefully suggests the need to rethink Hughes's later radicalism. But Jemie opens himself to the valid criticism of posing a false discontinuity between a supposedly proletarian-focused early Hughes and an African-decolonization-focused later Hughes. In fact, these were never mutually exclusive concerns of Hughes who, for example, wrote radical anti-colonial poems in what Jemie would see as his early "proletarian" period (e.g., "Call to Ethiopia").

(6.) Rampersad overstates Hughes's alienation from Africa. Hughes maintained his connection to African anti-colonialist work among black activists in the US through the '40s and '50s. See Note 20. Further, Rampersad notes that Hughes had been consulted in the late 1940s by Alioune Diop regarding his plans for Presence Africaine, and that Hughes began corresponding with Sedar Senghor in this period as well. Hughes's early and substantive relationships with such key figures in modern African literature only confirm that Hughes's African (re)turn was not abrupt. More importantly, a careful reading of Rampersad's biography for Hughes's travels to Africa and his relationships with African writers and intellectuals indicates the need for a sustained scholarly examination of Hughes's influence on African literature. The tendency in scholarship has been to focus on the one-way flow of influence, from Africa to America.

(7.) Hughes's dedicated effort in his last decades to bring Africa closer to US readers can also be seen in The First Book of Africa, the children's book that he also published in 1960, as well as in the 1963 publication of his edited volume, Poems from Black Africa: Ethiopia, South Rhodesia, Sierra Leone, Madagascar, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Kenya, Gabon, Senegal, Nyasaland, Mozambique, South Africa, Congo, Ghana, Liberia, which Asgill describes as "an effort to stress the growing cultural unity of black societies in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America" (45).

(8.) For my review of Hughes's Africa travels, I draw on the accounts of those travels in Rampersad's biography.

(9.) Among the hundreds of extant Hughes's letters, Rampersad focuses on the correspondence that begins at this time between Hughes and his self-proclaimed Nigerian "son," Chuba Nweke, who represents "the apparent embodiment of his fantasy of self-fulfillment" (Rampersad 239).

(10.) See Rampersad 291-92.

(11.) See Rampersad 223-62.

(12.) See especially pages ix-x, for instance, "There remains in my files of rejected material much worthy writing, which in some cases breaks my heart to return. There are excellent short stories that I feel are in some ways too special for American readers unfamiliar with the African scene."

(13.) See Von Eschen's Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957.

(14.) Malcolm X traveled through Africa on his return from Mecca in 1964. Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael), originator of the term "Black Power," traveled to Ghana in 1969.

(15.) The special significance of 1959 as a pivotal year within the African Treasury period 1954-1960 has not registered in Hughes scholarship. Rampersad implies that Hughes's engagement with African solidarity work early in 1959 reflected his unwillingness to join the upsurge of US Civil Rights activism. Instead of joining the freedom riders in the South and, as it were, getting his hands dirty, "his efforts on behalf of the race were more genteel" (292).

(16.) Without a view of African history in 1959, it is difficult to see Hughes's work for the "Gifts to Ghana" committee and his appearance at African Freedom Day celebrations in New York as anything more than the symbolic or "genteel" gestures suggested by Rampersad. But a view of African history was not lacking in Hughes. See below regarding Ghana's significance to the US black imagination.

(17.) These dreams would be translated before the end of the year into two and a half continuous months of columns espousing new realities of African self-determination. I examine this ten-column series on Africa separately in ""From Light in the Soviet Union to Sunrise Out of Africa: Rethinking Revolution in Langston Hughes African (Re)Turn 1954-1960."

(18.) Mboya's defense of the right of nations to choose socialism is a classic rhetorical tactic of left nationalists of the time and one that Hughes himself used not only in the 1930s but in 1959 as well. In the story" 'lf l Was President,' Says Simple" (Defender 21 Mar. 1959), Simple argues, "All you hear on the radio these days is Kruschev, Kruschev, Kruschev. if they would pay as much attention to Faubus as to Kruschev, we might get things straightened out in our own country."

(19.) It would be a mistake to assume that Hughes, the black press, or the black masses were spontaneously inspired by decolonizing Africa in the late 1950s. The very transmission of African liberation to the US in the late 1950s was enabled by the earlier anti-colonialist cultural and political work of black leftists in the US, especially through the '40s and '50s. As a critical reviewer of this essay pointed out, "While the Cold War forced Hughes to keep a lower political profile, he maintained contact with many individuals and institutions that led these activities (e.g., Council on African Affairs, The People's Voice newspaper, Freedom newspaper, Paul Robeson, Marvel Cooke, Louise Patterson, and William Patterson). Even when the Cold War succeeded in destroying or isolating many of the African American Left institutions that had flourished until the early 1950s, black leftists often were able to utilize groups like the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and AMSAC to do radical anti-colonialist political and cultural work." See Von Eschen and also Smethurst, "Don't Say Goodbye" (1225-26).

(20.) See Richards.

(21.) In late 1957, they drove off a Klan raid, then in 1958 mounted their much better-known organized armed defense, which Roy Wilkins cited in Williams's suspension from the NAACP in May 1959.

(22.) Although it was not the first sit-in of the Civil Rights Movement, the Greensboro sit-in of February 1, 1960, was publicized nationally and sparked the movement.

(23.) Chicago Defender 14 Feb. 1959: "NAACP Observes 50 Years of Fighting for Rights; On Threshold of Complete Victory." The Fight for Freedom Campaign, begun in 1953, set 1963 as the date by which they would achieve "the elimination of all state-imposed racial discrimination and segregation by 1963, the centennial of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation."

(24.) See Harper's collection of previously uncollected Simple stories, The Return of Simple and her critical study, Not So Simple: The "Simple" Stories of Langston Hughes. By selecting narrowly from Simple columns designed as series, scholars tend to reinforce a culturalist portrait of Hughes in which the later Hughes is seen as politically disengaged except in the cultural sphere. Harper's otherwise careful work reproduces this error, as Bertschman has also noted: "In fact, one minor criticism of Harper's work is that it seems to devalue what might be seen as Simple's political evolution: in the '40s and '50s, Simple's race-consciousness tends to be egocentric, spontaneous, reactive; by the mid-50s, his political awareness is expanding, and his opinions, speeches and fantasies reveal better organization and development, a more focused militancy-arguably, this reflects a shift in consciousness for many black Americans between World War II and the late '50s. Harper does not fully address this aspect of Simple's development and, in fact, she criticizes [it]" (42).

(25.) Specifying the second week of February, Dr. Carter Woodson launched "Negro History Week" in 1926. His organization, the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, expanded the week to "Black History Month" in 1976.

(26.) The questioning of nonviolence as a tactic is usually associated with the 1960's Civil Rights movement, especially with the challenge posed by Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, Jr., in a speech such as "The Ballot or the Bullet." Again, Hughes's work seems to anticipate rather than tail 1960s black nationalism. More importantly, that Hughes was not alone in his 1950's turn toward militancy indicates problematic tendencies in the prevalent views of the Civil Rights movement (i.e., the Civil Rights movement is seen as "moderate" and "integrationist" in the '50s, while "Black Power" is "militant" and "separatist" in the 1960s).

(27.) The Black Nation dreams are a subset within a larger series of dreams inspired in Simple by Africa decolonization. Remarkably, this African decolonization dream series has never been collected or republished by Hughes or scholars, nor has it been studied. Again, this omission is symptomatic of scholarly inattention to the development of Hughes's Africanist politics in his later years.

(28.) The defiant note sounded by Simple in these dreams is the point of origin for Hughes's poetics of the dozens in Ask Your Mama. The closing section of "Cultural Exchange" (the first section of Ask Your Mama) is an almost exact reiteration in 1961 of these 1959 "African dreams," including the list of white supremacist governor "mammies" (e.g. Mammy Faubus) whom Hughes has Simple list here. In fact, the last line of "Cultural Exchange" reprises the title of Hughes's May 23 column, "A Mint Julep, Mammy Faubus" (Collected Poems 481). This intertextual relationship has not been previously noted by Hughes scholars.

(29.) Once again, Hughes anticipates Black Power ideologies of the 1960s.

(30.) See Smethurst ("Don't Say Goodbye") for examples of the actions for which Hughes was criticized by 1960's black nationalists. Hughes, of course, was also the subject of similar criticisms from the socialist/communist Left. See Rampersad 259-60.

(31.) Later retitled as "Impasse" (Hughes, Collected Poems 458).

(32.) Later retitled as "Angola Question Mark."

(33.) Diop also targets the same religious hypocrisy addressed by Hughes in Black Orpheus, "Not for Publication" (which was later published as "Bible Belt"). Hughes writes,

   It would be too bad if Christ
   Were to come back black.
   There are so many churches
   Where he could not pray. (ll. 1-4)

In "To a Black Child," Diop writes,

   In the country where the houses touch the sky
   but where the heart is not touched
   In the country where the hand is placed on the Bible
   but where the Bible remains closed.

(34.) de Jongh argues that the representations of Africa in Hughes's later poetry are a relatively straightforward expansion of themes expressed at the beginning of his career.

(35.) This Liberator should not be confused with the two journals of the same title: the abolitionist journal of the 1800s (edited by William Lloyd Garrison) or the Popular Front journal of the 1930s (begun as the official organ of the American Negro Labor Congress).

(36.) The photo is of a black youth injecting himself with a needle in the ghetto. The photo caption reads: "He cannot get out. He exists helpless ... outside the American standard" (Finkenstaedt 13).

(37.) Smethurst in "Poetry and Sympathy" writes, "[R]ather than a unique 'city of refuge' or a neo-Emersonian figuration of African American future and possibility, invoked ... during the Negro Renaissance, Harlem became a kind of 'everyghetto.' In this later, overlapping vision Harlem embodied the conditions of oppression and poverty that were seen as attending urban black life throughout the United States" (263).

(38.) The Iogic here is patriarchal: Black poverty forces black wives to work, which destroys the family.

(39.) As is typical in this type of analysis, black people are seen to surfer oppression as an entire people (national oppression): it is not only poor or working class blacks who are affected but "respected citizens" and "store owners," the hundreds of churches that are broken into and robbed, the "middle class man whose son was addicted by a white doctor" (14).

(40.) Hughes's New York Post columns from the '60s suggest a similar analysis of black social problems through the lens of neocolonialism. In his column on the '64 Harlem rebellion, Hughes announces that "blame for the current riots goes, of course, far beyond the simple shooting" that precipitated it (qtd. in Clarke 214). He roots the problems in history: "the blood extends from the average of two lynchings a week in the South a half century ago to an average of one violent and unsolved black death a week in Dixie today" (qtd. in Clarke 215). The lack of black control of Harlem's economy makes Harlem comparable to a "dog" that has been starved and unattended for so long that it has, naturally, grown violent. In his New York Post column on rising crime in Harlem, Hughes declares that "we are America's Casbah": "There are so many dollars in the Casbah. Heroin produces many many more dollars. There are millions in the Casbah. Narcotics should begin its spelling with two strokes through it--$-$-$-$--dollars, dollars, dollars! Nice old lady--who raped you in the elevator? The answer, which you will not at the moment comprehend, is $$$$$ dollars" (21 May 1965).

(41.) In "From Light in the Soviet Union to Sunrise Out of Africa," I argue that this "lost" series is as important for understanding Hughes's 1960's radicalism as his much more visible Soviet Union column series is for understanding his 1930's radicalism.

(42.) In "An Aggressive Concept of the Popular," I situate the experimentalism of Ask Your Mama within a range of modernist poetries (by Charles Reznikorf, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka) whose special kind of mass- or movement-oriented avant-gardism needs further historicization, theorization, and appreciation within modern poetry studies.

(43.) Smethurst's The Black Arts Movement should enable significant advances.

(44.) To counter the critical tendency to de-radicalize the later Hughes, I have emphasized in this essay the recovery of Hughes's later radicalism. My emphasis should not be mistaken for an oversimplification of Hughes's complex relationship to the Black Arts Movement and black nationalism. The complexity of that relationship is clear, for instance, in the Simple tales that immediately follow the "Black Nation" dreams. Simple has a night of two dreams ("Simple Is a Dreaming Fool"), one in which he dreams that he is an African chief "and owned ten thousand cocoa farms and two meadows full of lions." As Harper has shown, the Simple tales are not easy to interpret ideologically because the parody and satire that create their humor are slippery (Not So Simple). In this "African king" dream, Hughes gently critiques the ways that the nationalist yearnings of the black masses can translate into naive and selfish desires. The African name-taking story that prefaces this Black Nation dream series (2 May) also carries critiques of the ethnocentrism and male chauvinism that can accompany nationalism. Aspects of Simple's Black Nation dreams themselves also suggest critiques of black supremacist or black chauvinist tendencies in black nationalism.

(45.) The problematic of the relationship between Marxism and nationalism--the national question--is a complex issue with a long, contested history. See Munck for a survey. Cedric Robinson has made one of the most noted cases for the incompatibility between Marxism and an independent "Black Radical Tradition." Though it covers 1960-1975, de Braganca and Wallerstein's The African Liberation Reader provides key documents from African national liberation movements that illuminate the theoretical and strategic nature of the challenge that these movements raised to earlier Western theories of revolution, especially regarding the relationship between class struggle and national (liberation) struggle.

(46.) I begin this project in "From Light in the Soviet Union to Sunrise Out of Africa: Rethinking Revolution in Langston Hughes African (Re)Turn 1954-1960."

Daniel Won-gu Kim is Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a member of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles.