Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of February 1st.
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It is the 32nd day of the year, leaving 333 days remaining in 2022. It is the first day of Black History Month.
His poems were lyrical works of arts that celebrated Black culture. His plays explored the Black experience in America. For 20 years, Hughes wrote a newspaper column on Black life for the Chicago Defender, a leading Black newspaper read across the United States.
His poetry shared his experiences as a Black man in American, portraying them as the typical Black stories. As poets.org wrote of his work: "He wanted to tell the stories of his people in way that reflected their actual culture, including their love of music, laughter, and language itself alongside their suffering."
In many ways, Hughes was an enigma. He was a private man who wrote two autobiographies. His two grandmothers had been born enslaved, and his two grandfathers had been engaged in the slave trade.
His poetry sometimes subtly hinted of gay love, but he never acknowledged whether he was gay, and his biographies are split on the issue. He did not like when Black people criticized each other or aired their grievances in public, yet one of his first plays, Mulatto, dealt with the color differences within the Black community. He, in turn, was sometimes criticized for the perceived uneveness in his writings.
Hughes was born in Joplin, Mo., but his family moved often when he was young, and he was mostly reared in Cleveland. He traveled to Europe and worked as a deckhand in his youth, But when landed in New York to attend Columbia University, he fell in love with Harlem, where he lived and worked for most of the rest of his life.
He became a part of the Harlem Renaissance and helped launch the magazine Fire!!!, which despite lasting only one issue, had an outsized influence during that time.
Hughes died in New York in 1967.
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