Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Let The People Speak, Part II of Poverty’s History, our special series on poor poets. One thing I didn’t know before I started working on this series, or had never really seen so clearly, is that the late 19th century was truly the age of the writer. There was finally a solid copyright law. Because of motorized printing presses, books were really cheap, and since more people were literate, sales were massive, especially since there was now a whole network of canals and railroads to ship them anywhere. Same with newspapers and magazines, which were cheaper still because ads effectively paid for the pages they were printed on.

The only people who were left out of this glorious new economy of letters, were the working class, the very people who’d built the canals and the railroads, and who operated the printing presses. Books were cheap, $1.25, $1.50, but that was still more than most laborers earned in a day. I can’t imagine they were writing much either. Who would be, after standing on your feet for over 12 hours a day, operating heavy machinery or digging a trench?

They were being written about, though, in the socially conscious novels and journalism of the time. There was a novelist in West Virginia who could see the iron mill next door from her window. And she described the night workers like this: “skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes, stooping all night over boiling cauldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy, breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot.”

But poor and working class people themselves were not writing or even reading. At least that was the going assumption. But according to Dr. Elizabeth McHenry, a literary historian at NYU who wrote the book Forgotten Readers, they most certainly were writing and reading. We just don’t know about it.

Elizabeth McHenry: For instance, in terms of African American readers specifically, most of what we know comes from our understanding of middle-class, fairly highly educated Black people who lived mostly in urban areas. But, how did print get to the vast majority of Black people—what W.E.B. Du Bois would have called “the masses”—who lived in the South, who lived in the Midwest, who lived not in urban areas, but in rural areas or in areas that just didn’t have a bookstore?

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) In the archives and hidden collections where she went looking for traces of African American working class literary life, Dr. McHenry found not that many books, but other formats—a hanging card, for instance, or a broadside.

Elizabeth McHenry: Often it was one poem on a sheet. So they could be hung on a wall. They could be performed in a church setting. And so, if a book were to cost $1.25, a single sheet would cost five cents.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) It wasn’t just cheaper, it also made sense in a community where not everyone could read.

Elizabeth McHenry: Some people were literate, to some degree. But others weren’t. And so, the history of Black readers is really a history of shared literacy. I think that’s probably the best way to say it. Where those who could read would read to those who could not.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) The only problem with this more democratic format is that it didn’t keep well.

Elizabeth McHenry: I mean, remember, a broadside is a single sheet of paper. And it is going to be passed around and gotten wet and spilled on and folded and put through the laundry … you know what happens to a single sheet of paper these days. And so it literally disintegrated. It didn’t survive. Or we don’t see it because it wasn’t in the form of a bound book. The thing about bound books is, one reason why we privilege them is that they survive because they are protected by binding. And so, imagine the forms of literature that have disappeared from sheer use.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) For years now, Dr. McHenry has been combing through ledgers and correspondence of local reading societies, unearthing unpublished manuscripts or loose sheets from archives, in an attempt to save some of the poems and stories she finds there: work that disappeared because it never had the protective binding of a book, it never got reviewed in the newspaper, and was never promoted by some big-name publisher based in New York.

Elizabeth McHenry: It seems to me so important to lay alongside the stories that we know much more fully.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Today, I’ll tell you about two poor poets who did make it into the American canon: Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes. Both of these poets we know about because they did get their poems into books that were then reviewed, anthologized, and taught in schools. Both poets had to navigate the complicated caste system of their time, codified, not just by class, but also race. Both, at times, paid a high price for their commercial success. And both were innovators, who listened for poetry in the speech of ordinary people. So here’s Part II of Poverty’s History: Let The People Speak.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Paul Laurence Dunbar is unique in that he was the first African American writer published by a commercial press who came from poverty. Though, when you see pictures of him, you’d never guess he’d known hardship. He looked like a perfectly polished Victorian gentleman: three-piece suit, white shirt with starched collar, hair in a middle part, sometimes a pair of glasses on his nose. Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, June 27, 1872, not even a decade after slavery ended. His parents had split up when he was just a little boy, and his mother Matilda, who used to be enslaved in Kentucky, did her best to take care of the children by herself: Paul, his older brothers Robert and William, and his little sister Elizabeth. Matilda worked as a washerwoman, which, according to Black labor historian Dr. Joe Trotter, at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, was a relatively good job at the time.

Joe Trotter: Because the washerwoman job was a job that allowed this woman to take the clothes home, and to work on her own, in her own home. And while she worked, she could tend her children, she could talk to her husband. She could do all kinds of things, so long as she got the job done, right. Got that laundry out. But she was under no supervision or close scrutiny doing her work. And that was a kind of an elite status within the working class itself that distinguished some of these women from their household counterparts.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Still, Matilda struggled to feed them all. Dunbar’s little sister Elizabeth died of malnutrition when she was two. Matilda tried to complement her income as best she could, taking in boarders to help with rent, and the three boys would make a bit of cash working as lamplighters, until electric streetlights were installed when Dunbar was 11. Soon, Dunbar’s brothers dropped out of school to get jobs, but Matilda did not want the same to happen to Paul. She herself had never learned to read or write on the plantation, but according to poet and scholar Dr. Tara Betts, Matilda taught herself so she could teach her son, Paul, when he was just four years old.

Tara Betts: His mother was his greatest champion, in terms of encouraging him to be a writer, teaching him how to read. And because of that, that’s kind of what spurred him to go forward as a writer.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) While Dunbar was growing up, the school landscape in Ohio was changing. By the time Dunbar was in high school, the state had gotten rid of mandatory school segregation. Many Black Ohioans had been fiercely opposed, fearing Black children would lose a foundation of African American community, history, and culture, and miss out on the excellence of Black teachers, who were all but sure to lose their jobs in an integrated system.

But Dunbar enrolled at the formerly all-white Central High, the only African American in his class. And according to Dr. Gene Jarrett, Dean and English Professor at NYU, and the author of an upcoming Dunbar biography, Dunbar excelled in high school, and he was popular, too. One of his friends was Orville Wright, one of the Wright Brothers, who’d go on to invent and fly the first airplane.

Gene Jarrett: And it was within this environment that Dunbar had access to the classical curriculum of his time, which includes, you know, the liberal arts education and learning philosophy, learning mathematics, learning English literature.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Once he graduated, there was no money to continue on and go to college, so Dunbar applied for any job that fit his level of education: journalist, clerk, accountant, receptionist. Dayton was a small town. Small enough for people to know who he was: class president, editor of the school paper, someone who was supposed to go far in life. But he was rejected everywhere he applied. When he finally did find someone who would hire him, it was to work as a janitor. Dunbar was thin and never in the best of health, so he wasn’t built for all this heavy lifting. He needed something else. That’s when he found the Callahan building, a seven-story office tower downtown. For four dollars a week he could start as an elevator operator, or as people said then,

Gene Jarrett: Quote-unquote, an elevator boy.

Tara Betts: I think you get to observe and see the world in a different way if you have that kind of job.

Gene Jarrett: And you had many clients going up and down the elevators. They went in there and they didn’t necessarily pay him any mind.

Tara Betts: I mean, in American culture, it’s very common for the people who do service work to be invisible.

Gene Jarrett: And so there were great stretches of time when there would be no passengers and he would have a chance to read.

Tara Betts: He often carried like a small notepad and a pen in his pocket. Sometimes if it was slow between floors or whatever, he would write poems.

Gene Jarrett: It also gave him a chance to observe passengers.

Tara Betts: We’re looking at this person who’s not seen as valuable, important or central to a conversation. But they’re there. So how do they process that? What are their thoughts as this is going on around them? I think so many of his poems hint at double consciousness, this idea of seeing and not being seen. Or knowing and not being known. Which everybody credits W.E.B. Du Bois with that, but Du Bois hadn’t really coined that term yet when Dunbar had published many poems. Like, probably one of his most famous poems, “We Wear The Mask,” is definitely a nod to that.

(READS POEM)

We Wear The Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

* * *

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Meanwhile, Dunbar knew exactly who he was, underneath that “elevator boy” smile and uniform. He was a writer. And so, every minute spent alone in his elevator, he was reading, or writing. His biggest inspiration were probably the stories his mother would tell him, about life on the plantation, but she left out the parts she was trying to forget. He also loved the Romantic poets—John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley. And also the “local color” literature that was popular then, where characters who spoke dialect just seemed so close to life, especially in the hands of James Russell Lowell or James Whitcomb Riley, all of whom he studied and made his own.

But what Dunbar did not know was how he could ever earn a living, writing. He didn’t know any writers personally, and there wasn’t anyone like him who had made a career as a writer. Sure, there were African American authors he knew of—Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, but those people were rich, compared to him, and had connections, either through their family or their colleges.

Then, one day, after he’d been at the elevator for over a year, one of his former high school teachers invited Dunbar to a writer’s conference in Dayton. He was asked to come up and recite some of his poems, and was introduced to a visiting physician and poet named James Newton Matthews. Dr. Matthews was so impressed that he came to see Dunbar at his elevator the next day. He even bought a few poems, which he included in an article that then ended up in the hands of no other than James Whitcomb Riley, the “local color” writer Dunbar so admired. Riley was impressed, and took the time to write Dunbar an encouraging letter.

Gene Jarrett: It wasn’t until he was actually in these deeper relationships with these writers and these benefactors that he started to understand the world of literary patronage. You know, there are people who can support you as a professional writer. And at the same time, what it means to earn a living by writing. So how do you have a steady stream of literature that you’re producing that’s acceptable by either periodicals or publishers to support yourself financially.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) The conference and the encouragement he received afterwards gave Dunbar confidence. He decided to take his best poems to a job printer and have them create an actual book. But when he heard the quote, $125, Dunbar realized there was simply no way. It meant almost eight months worth of pay. He must have looked heartbroken, because one man who worked at the printer’s took pity on him and loaned him the money, and Oak and Ivy was printed. Every day, at the elevator, Dunbar sold copies for a dollar each to anyone who was interested, until he could pay back the loan.

He had high hopes that this book would set him on a path away from the elevator, and into the world of letters. A few months later, he took a bold step. He quit his job and left for Chicago, where the World’s Fair was. The plan was, he’d work odd jobs and write an article about the fair. He got lucky, found one job after another—he even got hired at the World’s Fair, the Haitian exhibit, as a clerical assistant by no other than Frederick Douglass. And he was making more money than he’d ever made, $10.50 a week. 

But his luck did not last. As the World’s Fair wrapped up, the depression of 1893 hit, and work dried up. He had no choice but to pack up, return to Dayton, and ask for his job back. After all the excitement up in Chicago, being back to playing “elevator boy” at the same old building in the same old uniform made him feel like that’s all he’d ever do.

Gene Jarrett: He even characterized it as “being chained to the ropes of my dingy elevator.”

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) “There is only one thing left to be done,” he wrote a friend when he was feeling really hopeless, “and I am too big a coward to do that.” But Dunbar continued writing, and sending his poems to magazines. And with each acceptance or rejection, he learned something about the market: what sold and what did not.

Gene Jarrett: He understood very well that the majority of the people who were reading his poems, for example, at any one time, were white. And so it was there that he tried to pursue the psychology of that readership. What is the kind of work that they very much would appreciate?

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) He knew that if he ever wanted to make it out of his elevator, he had to figure out how to present himself on the literary market, and to the demographic that came with it.

Elizabeth McHenry: Dunbar recognized that he was at his most popular when he wrote what essentially white readers wanted of a Black writer.

Gene Jarrett: He knew very much that there was a vogue for what was called literary dialect, the ways in which people, either within a region, or presumably of a certain kind of racial ethnic background would speak. And so it is true that he was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, that his access to the South was minimal or indirect at best, given that his parents were from Kentucky. But, he nonetheless was able to give the impression, based on the kinds of representations of African American individuals and their modes of speech, that this was the story of Black life.

(Recording of Herbert Woodward Martin reading “A Negro Love Song” PLAYS)

I SEEN my lady home las’ night,

Jump back, honey, jump back.

Hel’ huh han’ an’ sque’z it tight,

Jump back, honey, jump back.

I Hyeahd huh sigh a little sigh,

Seen a light gleam f’om huh eye,

An’ a smile go flittin’ by—

Jump back, honey, jump back

(FADES OUT)

* * *

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) The problem with being as poor as he was, and as dependent on the people who bought books, meaning, overwhelmingly, white middle class readers, was that, sometimes, Dunbar went really far in trying to please his audience. For instance, in his poem “Chrismus on the Plantation,” he rehashes some of the clichés of the worst form of dialect writing—“plantation literature,” usually written by white Southerners like Thomas Nelson Page or Joel Chandler Harris.

Elizabeth McHenry: But this idea of plantation fiction was full of nostalgia for a past that never really existed, which had very stock representations of Black people generally. I mean, we would today call them stereotypes as much as anything else.

Tara Betts:

(STARTS READING “Chrismus on the Plantation”)

Chrismus on the Plantation

Elizabeth McHenry: And in some sense, romanticizing a world where in fact, slaves were happy,

Tara Betts:

(READS)

Fu’ a da’ky ’s allus happy when de holidays is neah.

Elizabeth McHenry: Whites were very paternalistic, you know, in a good way. In other words, it was sort of a caretaking relationship.

Tara Betts:

(CONTINUES READING POEM)

But we wasn’t, fu’ dat mo’nin’ Mastah ‘d tol’ us we mus’ go,

He ‘d been payin’ us sence freedom, but he couldn’t pay no mo’;’

I kin see him stan’in’ now erpon de step ez cleah ez day,

Wid de win’ a–kind o’ fondlin’ thoo his haih all thin an’ gray;

An’ I ‘membah how he trimbled when he said, “It’s ha ‘d fu’ me,

Not to mek yo’ Chrismus brightah, but I ‘low it wa’n’t to be.”

All de women was a–cryin’, an’ de men, too, on de sly,

An’ I noticed somep’n shinin’ even in ol’ Mastah’s eye.

Elizabeth McHenry: But this was the most positive, it seems to me, acceptable representation of African Americans, because remember, there is also a school of literature and a set of authors that are working on a much more violent and heinous depictions of African Americans, African American men as brutes, as rapists.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Over the past decade and a half, ever since the federal troops that had guarded the civil rights of Black people in the South were recalled, white supremacists had gone into overdrive, putting Black people “in their place” by intimidating voters at the polls, beating up elected officials, burning down thriving neighborhoods, and lynching people for the most ridiculous of “offenses,” real or invented—stealing hogs, stealing chickens, looking at or talking to a white woman, “acting white.”

But maybe most pernicious was the culture war. Both North and South were blanketed with racist propaganda—minstrelsy shows, postcards, political cartoons, ads, figurines. But it also included “scientific racism,” (measuring skulls was popular), racist “theology” (arguing there was no way Black people could be descended from Adam and Eve), and then there were the sensational, racist screeds warning about the unspeakable things Black men would supposedly do to white women.

Elizabeth McHenry: The narrative that Paul Laurence Dunbar spins does not have Black people as violent or overly sexualized in the same way that the writing of these white authors that comes to a peak in the 1910s and 1920s. But they are all narratives of Blackness to try and sort of locate Black people in ways that are comfortable for white readers. It seems to me that they have little to do with actual Black people.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Dunbar understood what the white middle-class book-buyer seemed to want from him. But he also knew what he wanted. To be taken seriously as an American poet, a poet who could evoke something of the essence of all human experience. 

Tara Betts: You know, a great bulk of his work is not written in that particular vernacular. It’s written in standard, what we would call, some of us, standard English. You know.

(RECORDING of “Invitation to Love” BEGINS TO PLAY)

Invitation to Love

Tara Betts: It’s very lofty,

(RECORDING CONTINUES)

Come when the nights are bright with stars

Or come when the moon is mellow;

Come when the sun his golden bars

Drops on the hay-field yellow.

(FADES OUT)

Tara Betts: It takes on a lot of the conventions that we would expect of a Romantic poet, really.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) But the critics deemed those poems inferior.

Tara Betts: In particular, there was a critic named William Dean Howells, who led the charge for that.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) William Dean Howells was one of the most admired critics of his time, and probably one of the most highly paid, too. Harper’s Weekly gave him $13,000 dollars a year—more than 60 times what Dunbar made—to write one novel, one farce, and a monthly critical essay. For the June 1896 essay, Howells decided to review Dunbar’s second self-published collection, Majors and Minors. Howells was known for paying attention to writers the white, patriarchal literary establishment largely ignored—women, immigrants, African Americans. But that didn’t mean that he didn’t also drum up every stereotype for dramatic effect. In the case of Dunbar, Howells starts not with his poetry, but his picture. A warning: it’s pretty racist, so fast forward 30 seconds if you want. The review opens, “the face which confronted me when I opened the volume was the face of a young Negro, with the race traits strangely accented: the black skin, the woolly hair, the thick out-rolling lips, and the mild, soft eyes of the pure African type. One cannot be very sure of the age of these people, but I should have thought that this poet was about twenty years old; and I suppose that a generation ago he would have been worth, apart from his literary gift, twelve or fifteen hundred dollars under the hammer.” So much for Dunbar’s hope he would be read as an American poet. After that opening paragraph, Howells goes on to say that the poems in “Standard English” show “honest thinking and true feeling,” but are otherwise not “specially notable.” The dialect poems is where Howells gets excited. He had a weakness for anything he thought of as realist, and so in his eyes, Dunbar’s dialect poems were not just “vivid”, they also spoke with “fresh authority,” on the lives of Black people.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Tara Betts: And he focused so much on that that it seemed that every critic afterward said that was what he did. To the point where they even use the same words as the other critics.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) The review being what it is—incredibly racist for starters—did do one thing: it made Dunbar famous overnight. Right after it was published, Dunbar and his mother went out of town for a few days, and when they came back, over 200 letters were stuffed inside the mailbox and behind the shutters of their front window. It was the end of his financial troubles. Dunbar was finally approached by a commercial press, the New York-based Dodd, Mead & Co. He went on to write and publish 11 more books of poetry, five short story collections, two novels, got to write and produce plays and musicals, and became a famous speaker, in the US and England. Plus, he was able to buy his mother Matilda a nice, nine-room house in Dayton.

Gene Jarrett: However, he would go on to say later on that he felt handcuffed by this praise from William Howells because it crystallized the marketplace that was accessible to him.

Elizabeth McHenry: What I think he came to realize was that if he wanted to succeed as a writer, he had to write what sold. Rather than what, you know, what he might prefer to write.

Gene Jarrett: Dunbar is a complicated figure. On the one hand, he would send William Howells letters of appreciation, thanking him for what he had bestowed on his verse. But at the same time, he would write a letter to Alice—

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) his wife—

Gene Jarrett: talking about how he bemoaned that he was pigeonholed and that it’s difficult to get out of it. So he likened it to being a caged bird.

(RECORDING of David E. Kirkland reading “Sympathy” BEGINS TO PLAY)

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!

When the sun is bright on the upland slopes

When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,

and the river flows like a stream of glass;

Gene Jarrett: And so that has been kind of the central metaphor for his career.

(RECORDING of David E. Kirkland CONTINUES)

I know what the caged bird feels!

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Dunbar died from tuberculosis at the age of 33, in 1906. Almost as soon as he died, he started falling out of vogue.

Tara Betts: I think Dunbar has been forced into antiquity in ways that really underestimate his contribution. I mean, we celebrate Hughes all the time. But we don’t look at Dunbar as an architect, right? That there would be no Hughes without Dunbar.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Gene Jarrett: I also think that now that we’re in the 21st century and there have been renewed analyses of how he was actually quite innovative in this kind of double tongue of speaking to, on the one hand, predominantly white audiences, but also having this kind of undercurrent of political rhetoric that could be picked up by those who understood the codes at that time.

Tara Betts: He was he was making these little side comments about race and poverty and culture of the time.

(RECORDING of Herbert Woodward Martin reading “Philosophy” PLAYS)

Oh dey ‘s times fu’ bein’ pleasant an’ fu’ goin’ smilin’ roun’,

‘Cause I don’t believe in people allus totin’ roun’ a frown,

But it’s easy ‘nough to titter w’en de stew is smokin’ hot,

But hit’s mighty ha’d to giggle w’en dey’s nuffin’ in de pot.

Tara Betts: I also think he got away with a lot of things because he was such a master of a dialect that people often belittled. He knew that these were the folks people looked down on. So, I don’t want to call it plantation literature, because I feel like, to even call his work that, and to reduce it to that, is a way to make him be at a distance from the canon. And I kind of feel like Dunbar was the precursor for anybody trying to write poetry that captured the way a person spoke. Dunbar would tell you a story like he’s talking to you. And also celebrating everyday people. People you would see in your neighborhood, people you would see who are just trying to find a way to make it like everybody else. And you see that clearly in Langston Hughes’ poems as well.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) As writers, Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar did have a lot in common. But as people, bound up with the times they lived in, they could not have been more different. The age difference between them was not enormous, a mere generation. But Langston Hughes was born in 1901, the first year of the 20th century.

Elizabeth McHenry: I think the 20th century moves really fast.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Cities were ballooning, and after the depression of 1893 had lifted, the economy was again humming along. Many middle-class people were buying their first mass-produced car, radio, and electric washing machine. Workers, who did not see their lives improve even though they were the ones making all this stuff, were unionizing in ever greater numbers, and going on strike, to demand higher pay, shorter days, safer conditions, and an end to child labor. Reformers were fighting for better housing, schools and social assistance for the poor. While women pushed for the right to vote, four states had already capitulated.

But the change that most clearly encapsulates the difference between the world of Dunbar and the world of Hughes, is the fall-out between the two leading Black intellectuals of the time: Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.

In 1895, when Dunbar was 23 (Hughes wasn’t yet born), Booker T. Washington, the head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had gone up in front of an audience of white people at a convention in Atlanta to give a speech. In this speech, he urged Black people not to get so hung up on politics, higher education, or culture, and focus on economic progress instead. “No race can prosper,” Washington had said, “till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”

Du Bois initially congratulated him on the speech. But then something happened that shook him to his core. Again, a warning—feel free to skip ahead. Du Bois had been in Atlanta, on his way to a meeting with a writer, when he saw, in the window of a store, a ‘souvenir’ from a recent lynching: a Black man’s burned knuckles. What amount of economic progress could ever make up for that?

What was needed, in the words of Du Bois, was a radical change in “race consciousness,” and he was going to help bring it about.

Elizabeth McHenry: He actually bought a printing business. For some reason, and I mean, I can talk about the reasons, but for some reason he felt the need to invest essentially his entire life savings in a printing business in Memphis, Tennessee.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) I guess you could say he seized the means of production. It was the only way Du Bois could follow his own editorial line, when it came to issues of race, instead of having to follow the one laid down by Booker T. Washington and his sympathizers at the liberal press.

Using his own printer, Du Bois launched a magazine, The Moon, the first illustrated weekly for an African American audience. But it soon folded, as did his next, The Horizon. In 1910, he was ready to try again, and launched The Crisis. This time, he even quit his teaching job at Atlanta University so nothing would get in the way. Dunbar would not live to see it. He died four years before The Crisis was launched. But in just a few years, it became the most widely read publication on race and social injustice in America. By the time Langston Hughes was 17, The Crisis had a monthly circulation of 100,000 copies.

Elizabeth McHenry: The success of The Crisis is pretty huge. And I think one reason why The Crisis survives is that Du Bois actually focuses on it. He focuses all his attention on it. The other reason is clearly because it has the backing of the NAACP. And by the backing, I mean the financial backing, the finances of that.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) But there was another reason why The Crisis and other publications targeting Black readers were doing so well.

Elizabeth McHenry: These later magazines, in some sense, benefited as well from the urbanness of the Black population in the beginning of the 20th century.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Ever since America had gotten involved in the World War, and the factories had emptied out, factory owners had gone South to look for new hires. African Americans left the South in droves. “The treatment doesn’t warrant staying,” one man in Alabama told a reporter. In cities up North and out West, the so-called “promised land,” you could earn as much as three times what you’d made before, or a little less than twice as much if you accounted for the higher rent. As a result, people had money to invest back into the community.

Elizabeth McHenry: The fact of African Americans living together, certainly being, you know, in many cases, more economically prosperous, also leads to a greater support for print sources and a greater ability to support, for instance, more than one newspaper. And I think that that also plays a big role in not only the popularity of those papers, but their survival.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) These new publications, financed by a community of readers, or by an independent organization such as the NAACP, created a platform as there had never been before.

Elizabeth McHenry: It’s like the audacity of print, that things that can be said and the ways that Black writers, you know, started using Black print in some ways to advance ideas about racial politics, about Black identity. And quite honestly, not to toe the line, and to communicate the kinds of things that white readers expected.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Paul Laurence Dunbar never got the chance to write in a literary context that wasn’t uniformly white and middle class. He never had the opportunity to work with Black publishers, editors, reviewers, and readers. Langston Hughes did, just a decade or two later. Though the problems of race and class remained.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in the mining city of Joplin, Missouri, which wasn’t where he grew up.

Tara Betts: He got shuffled around a lot as a kid.

R. Baxter Miller: There are at least three states that claim Langston Hughes: Missouri, the state of his birth, Kansas, in which he grew up a good bit, and obviously New York. By the time he was a teenager, he was in Ohio. I told you they were moving around.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) This is Dr. R. Baxter Miller, English professor at the University of Georgia. He told me that Hughes’s parents had split up not long after Hughes was born. His father, James, had studied law, but when the all-white examining board in Oklahoma refused to let him take the bar exam, he was so disgusted with American racism that he packed up and moved to Mexico. Hughes’s mother, Carrie, who had not wanted to join him, was always moving, in search of cheaper rent and work—as a stenographer, clerk, travel agent, cook, waitress, anything. Sometimes she took Langston with her, sometimes she didn’t.

R. Baxter Miller: The great solidifying figure in his life was his grandmother.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) His grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, lived in Lawrence, Kansas. She was a prominent member of the community. Her first husband had died fighting alongside the abolitionist John Brown. The second had been a Reconstruction politician. But by the time Hughes moved in, she was a widow in her 70s, struggling to buy enough food or pay the mortgage. Sometimes she would rent out the little house for $10 or $12 a month, while the two of them stayed with friends. She did have a well-off brother-in-law in DC, who she could have asked for help, but she never wanted to. “You see,” Langston Hughes would later say about that, “my grandmother was very proud.” When Hughes was 14, his grandmother died. He moved again, then once more, and the third time he ended up with his mother and her new husband in Cleveland, Ohio. In high school in Cleveland, Hughes first started writing dialect poems in the style of Paul Laurence Dunbar, who he read almost exclusively when he was a kid. It was at this high school, too, that Hughes was first introduced to radical politics. He and his classmates, many of whom were Jewish or Eastern European immigrants, were always discussing what they’d read in that week’s progressive papers—The Liberator, Socialist Call.

R. Baxter Miller: At lunch, hall discussions before going through, class itself, when they’d be talking about politics. Apparently, they were very socially aware in the way that this rarely has been true in in American high schools, I would think.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) When the Russian Revolution broke out, in 1917, his school almost burst out in celebration. A few months later, the US got involved in the war, and started cracking down on any anti-war activities. Thousands of workers and farmers who resisted the draft were arrested.

R. Baxter Miller: Whoever was on trial, was it Debs or whatever—

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Eugene Debs, the socialist former presidential candidate and organizer, who’d been arrested after he gave an anti-war speech, and convicted to 10 years in prison.

R. Baxter Miller: Whoever was on trial, they had some discussion about it. And I think that your childhood impacts your loyalties. You define your loyalties by where your heart and your memory are. And for Hughes, his memory and his heart were always with the people who were struggling for social justice.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) After high school, Langston Hughes had an opportunity Dunbar never had. His father offered to pay for college. But there was one condition: it had to be engineering. Hughes agreed, and enrolled at Columbia. He didn’t like his classmates, who mostly ignored him. The program didn’t interest him much either, and those factory-like buildings depressed him, so he started skipping class. He’d walk around Chinatown, attended the funeral of a famous vaudeville star, and went to see the same tap dancing musical on Broadway several times, all the while reading exactly what he wanted. After a year of that, he officially dropped out.

That summer, he got his first poem published in W.E.B. Du Bois’s magazine The Crisis. The poem is titled “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and it gained him immediate popularity. Du Bois even asked the literary editor of the magazine, Jessie Fausset, how it was possible that someone “writes like that and is yet unknown to us?”

But one poem would not sustain him for long. Hughes needed a job. Plus, he wanted to see something of the world. So when he was 21, he signed up to work on a cargo ship, the S.S. Malone.

R. Baxter Miller: I mean, again, it’s not specified in his biographies. It’s not specified in his autobiographies. But you can certainly say that it’s a low class cleanup guy, I always think scrubbing decks and running chores, whatever they would be, you know, getting food into the diner or something. Things that had to be done. “Could you patch up that hole?” With Hughes it’s almost always some form of cleaning and washing. Remember, Hughes was working most of the time, even up through his 20s, in Paris, as a busboy and not a man of letters. He would say, “I was second cook,” but second cook was really a dishwasher. I mean, he was a great dishwasher. Throughout the 20s, Hughes was probably as much a dishwasher and a waiter as anything.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Now is probably a good time to tell you about Harlem. The Great Migration had radically altered many northern cities, but New York, and Harlem, especially.

Joe Trotter: Caribbean, African, and Southern Blacks are pouring into New York City. New York is becoming what is called the largest Black metropolis in the world. And of course, there are a lot of factors in why Harlem became such a magnet itself. Having to do with the real estate boom and collapse—

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) That was in 1904.

Joe Trotter: Had the real estate boom of buildings for white people sustained itself and hadn’t collapsed, then the chances of Black people moving in such numbers would have been very minimal. But that economic bubble burst, okay. And African American realtors were able to find a way, you know, to put Black people into better homes, better and more healthy homes. And those homes were relatively spacious and of course, new, relatively new. So it was good housing for Black people to move into.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Of course, many landlords decided to overcharge them and cram as many people as they could together in shoddily subdivided apartments, but that did not deter these new New Yorkers.

Joe Trotter: They were people determined to make the city their home. They saw the city as the next best place for them to build families, build communities and become independent people. And also, Marcus Garvey’s movement, the Universal Negro Improvement Association. It came to the United States around 1916 or so. And it became a major mass movement connecting Black people in the United States, the Caribbean and Africa. With this back to Africa sort of theme, even though the ideal of back to Africa didn’t overshadow the ideal that Black people should be building independent communities inside of the United States. And so, it was a promoter of Black business, Black institutions, Black newspapers. And it wanted to connect Black people to their common history and connection to Africa or to each other.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) When Hughes was 23, done with living in Europe, and came back to the United States, Harlem was where he wanted to live. It didn’t take long before he found friends and fellow writers, like Arna Bontemps, Carl Van Vechten, Zora Neale Hurston, but also other kinds of artists, editors, and curators. Hughes wrote and went to parties and walked the streets. In 1925, one editor, Alain Locke, decided to showcase their work in an issue of Survey Graphic magazine he guest-edited, titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.” What we now call the Harlem Renaissance was born.

Elizabeth McHenry: In many ways, the Harlem Renaissance is all about a sort of flowering of Black voice. And a Black voice that is unapologetically Black. It comes out of seeing Black people around you all the time. When I say the joy of that, I mean the comfort of that, like the beauty of that. Like recognizing your own beauty and seeing it everywhere and feeling supported. And obviously, the Harlem Renaissance is such a visual moment. I mean, the most famous image is perhaps the cover of Alain Locke’s “The New Negro,” the Survey Graphic issue.

Helena de Groot: Can you describe a little bit what that looked like?

Elizabeth McHenry: Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, I think if you were looking at it quickly, you’d say, well, you know, this is more like African art. And if you look further into the issue, there is African art, like, African art is on display. You know, one interesting thing to do would be to contrast the images of something like The Colored American magazine.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Which catered to middle and upper class African Americans.

Elizabeth McHenry: Very proper, and, you know, hair was controlled and colors were high and skin wasn’t too dark. But then you get to “The New Negro” and it’s sort of, you know, full-blooded, you know, I think that would be the term then. You know, it’s people with African features. And relishing in them. Describing them as a richness, not a deficit. And I think that is the distinction. That’s what “The New Negro,” the publication, and the New Negro Movement really embraced and celebrated.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) But the same editor who had started the movement, Alain Locke, wasn’t so keen on this new, proud, African aesthetic.

Elizabeth McHenry: Alain Locke managed to nurture all these artists even when he didn’t really fully understand them or, in some ways, the magic of their art. And so this the story of like, disdain and incredible insight at the same time.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) And here we’re back to class. Because while many of the younger, working class artists drew inspiration from Africa, Alain Locke, a Howard philosophy professor with degrees from Harvard and Oxford was most comfortable in Europe.

Elizabeth McHenry: Alain Locke loved Europe. He loved Europe. He loved European art. He loved European culture. He loved Europe because he didn’t feel weird there in the same way he felt weird in the States. So, for him to be in Europe was like, a magical thing. And for him to show these Black artists this world that he had come to learn, love and fully appreciate was for him really magical.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) When Hughes was still in Europe, working as a busboy in Paris, Alain Locke, who’d been impressed by Hughes’s poems in The Crisis, asked the magazine for Hughes’s address, then came knocking on his door to invite him on a private tour of Venice. In his autobiography, Hughes writes what happened. “He knew who had painted all the pictures, and who had built all the old buildings, and where Wagner had died.” But soon, Hughes writes, “I got a little tired of palaces and churches and famous paintings and English tourists.” He started to wander around on his own, looking for the side of Venice no guide would ever tell him about. It didn’t take long: “plenty of poor people in Venice,” he writes, “and plenty of back alleys off canals too dirty to be picturesque.”

R. Baxter Miller: I think that there was a side of Hughes that was that was somewhat wary about being sucked too far into the Black middle classness.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) He may have grown up without much money, but he could definitely pass for middle class, if he wanted. There was the way he spoke—

R. Baxter Miller: I can sort of hear Langston Hughes saying, “I’ve known Rivers.” Not his voice. Just not there. I’m not there.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

R. Baxter Miller: It’s much drier, carefully measured.

Langston Hughes:

(RECORDING of Langston Hughes PLAYS)

This is “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” one of my earliest poems, written in 1920, just as I came out of high school. The way this poem came to be written was that I was going to Mexico to visit my father, who lived in Mexico City, and on the train, going across the Mississippi river, just outside St. Louis, I looked out the window and I saw this great, muddy river flowing down towards the heart of the South. And I began to think about what this river meant to the Negro people. And so, I took my father’s letter out of my pocket and began to write down on the back of his letter this poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

(FADES OUT)

R. Baxter Miller: I must say that sometimes I like my reading of it better than I like his reading of it.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Hughes didn’t just sound middle class, he looked it, too.

R. Baxter Miller: Hughes looked very unassuming, Not prim, but certainly very comfortable, nice appearing middle class young man that you might like to shake hands with and who would be respectful, that would not be offensive in any way. You know, he wouldn’t have been the guy that’s necessarily down with it or whatever. You know, nice, nerdy kind of guy who does the right thing.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) But, over time, he’d grown more and more uncomfortable with his own nice, middle-class ways. What was he trying to prove? Who was he trying to impress? Did he even like these people?

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Dr. Miller recalls one incident, in 1925, at a dinner honoring the great Black lyric tenor Roland Hayes. Langston Hughes, who had just been featured in the Survey Graphic issue, was invited too, and seated farthest away from Hayes. The lady sitting next to Hughes kept her back turned to him the entire dinner, only addressing the famous tenor at the other end of the table.

R. Baxter Miller: “Oh, yes, Mr. Hayes. Yes, we understand. Yes, yes, you said, so, so important.” So about three days later, maybe even a week, Hughes gets a memo from this woman who says, “Why, she didn’t know that she was sitting next to the poet Langston Hughes, why, we could have talked!”

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

He despised African American pretentiousness.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) He felt the full force of this pretentiousness when he came out with his next collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew. These were poems written from the perspective of those, as Hughes explained to a journalist, “to whom life is least kind.” “I try to catch the hurt of their lives,” he said, “the monotony of their ‘jobs,’ and the veiled weariness of their songs.” But Black critics were merciless. “About 100 pages of trash,” went one typical review, “it reeks of the gutter and sewer.” Their snobbishness only confirmed what he already knew: these were not people he wanted much to do with.

R. Baxter Miller: And then, later in his life, he would appear to you as identifying with the poor rather than the Black middle class.

Helena de Groot: I wonder what his father had to do with that?

R. Baxter Miller: His father?

Helena de Groot: Yes.

R. Baxter Miller: Whoa, now there is an excellent question. There is a lot, a lot, a whole whole lot. Now, James Hughes, the father did not believe that discrimination in United States would ever be overcome. And that’s why he moved to Mexico. His father was creating a sort of middle class Black life.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) He buys property in Mexico City and a big ranch in the hills. He lends money and forecloses on people when they can’t pay, takes their homes, even their cows.

R. Baxter Miller: He has he brings in a German housekeeper, no less, I mean … and Langston Hughes hated the way his father looked down on the Native Americans in Mexico. He used all the Western stereotypes, you know, they weren’t going to be good for anything and blah, blah.

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

Parents can be one of two things. Either you move in the direction that they were or you look at them and see, I’ve got to go another path. It was B. Look, I am not going to be this pseudo colonialist, acculturated, self-hating Negro like my father. And this is one of the Langston Hughes’s greatest contributions to African American literature and culture. The first step is to appreciate yourself. You are not what history says you are. You are who you know you are. And his father didn’t learn that. And because his father didn’t learn that, his father really never appreciated that the value of Langston Hughes is that he would speak that truth to all African American generations who would come after. So his notion was that African American success is success only if you do it as who you are. If you had to forfeit who you are to achieve financial level, you aren’t Black, and you aren’t free.

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) From the mid-1920s onward, Langston Hughes started to change his appearance. In pictures, you’ll see him dressed in a loose-fitting shirt with the sleeves rolled up, or a stripy T-shirt, cigarette in hand. Dressing so casually would have been unimaginable for someone like Dunbar, just two decades before, who had to be all buttoned up if he wanted to “pass” as a writer.

But these were the mad years of the ’20s. The social codes were changing, and looking like a bohemian worker was a perfectly good look for a writer, even one who, like Hughes, was published by the prestigious New York house Knopf. The Harlem Renaissance was all the rage, and Harlem Renaissance artists could get away with things.

Elizabeth McHenry: Remember, Black writing at this point is—when I say wildly, I mean, you know, certain writing by Black authors is selling. And some of it still caters to some kind of sensational notion that Harlem is this exotic spot and that Black people are, you know, up there doing crazy, crazy things that you want to be a part of, even if you don’t actually want to go there. You know, that you want to be a sort of voyeur about.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) As the money came pouring in, staying close to who you were was not always that easy.

R. Baxter Miller: How do you navigate the money? How do you navigate the patronage? How do you navigate the middle class? You need them. But if you aren’t careful, they’ll own you.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) The trickiest relationships to navigate, probably, were those between artists and patrons. Especially if the artists in need of money were young and Black, and the patron holding the purse strings was some two generations older, and white.

Charlotte Osgood Mason was a widow who lived in a big apartment on Park Avenue, with uniformed servants to take care of her every need. She had been born into a wealthy family, and had married a well-respected surgeon, Rufus Mason. He was also a pioneering ‘parapsychologist,’ engaged in things like telepathy and clairvoyance (which were then considered scientific). He had a larger theory about it all. Western civilization had become deformed, he felt, obsessed with “rationality,” and had lost its connection to the “all-pervasive Divine.”

His wife, Charlotte, went even further; she had a specific cure in mind: “the creative impulse throbbing in the African race.” After her husband died, Charlotte Mason went looking for ways to use her money to support this vision. Then, at an art gallery, she met professor Alain Locke.

R. Baxter Miller: Mason thought that the 50-year-old Locke was a nice boy.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) The meeting convinced Mason that the Harlem Renaissance was exactly what she’d been looking for. And so, starting in 1927, when Mason was 73 and Hughes was 26, she started pouring her money into the movement, at one time or another supporting at least seven different artists, but most of all Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes.

R. Baxter Miller: Mason funded Hughes, funded trips for Hughes, funded some clothes for Hughes, put Hughes on allowance.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) But it didn’t take long for Hughes to understand what she wanted in exchange. She had a habit of controlling him. Deciding who he could and could not see, what he should read, even what music he should listen to. But worst of all, she wanted him to make what she thought African American art was.

R. Baxter Miller: She wanted him to be primitive.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) By 1930, Langston Hughes had enough, and he told Charlotte Mason he couldn’t accept her patronage anymore.

R. Baxter Miller: Hughes was smart enough to realize exactly where he was in his career, exactly how much money he was taking in and when he was strong enough to break with Mason and not be destroyed by it.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) He did not miscalculate: Langston Hughes was able to survive just fine. But the power this wealthy patron had been able to wield had shocked him, and it made him more radical than he’d ever been, especially once the Great Depression hit. When he walked outside, he saw New Yorkers sleeping in subways and doorways, and long lines at soup kitchens and Salvation Army shelters. A quarter of all people were unemployed.

Joe Trotter: And it is a huge unemployment rate. But for Black people inside the cities, that rate usually about tripled. This is an environment in which African Americans had to become very, very creative. For example, took advantage of small plots of land, to grow gardens, to produce food that will supplement the family diet. Even though they were in cities, they took up hunting and they could go hunting—rabbit hunting, dear hunting, all kinds of hunting. Black women and children entered the labor market in ways that they had not maybe entered it before. The family, if they were not evicted, most often families would strategize. They would have rent parties. They’re taking boarders even when they’re already overcrowded. You know, one more boarder, maybe was able to add a little bit to the to the mix. So that’s one way you can understand the impact of this calamity on the Black community.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Langston Hughes poured his anguish into poems that sounded more and more like Communist Party material, calling for workers to rise up and revolt. And though he never became an official member of the party, he started publishing in Marxist magazines closely tied to it, such as New Masses. And in 1932, he left the United States to go on an extended trip to the Soviet Union. He worked on a radical movie that never came to be, and he visited schools, hospitals, and factories, to write about for various leftist American publications. Meanwhile, in America, the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, which would hire millions of people to maintain parks, build roads, bridges, schools and houses, hadn’t been formed yet. And so, while Langston Hughes was traveling around, things were pretty dire for most Americans.

Helena de Groot: Did he feel like he had a responsibility to people who were struggling?

R. Baxter Miller: I love that question because the question always means, what material did he do? As wonderful as a question as it is, it completely underestimates the importance of the artists within African American culture. He wrote. (PAUSES) He wrote. You know, isn’t it interesting? Bearing in mind the writing has a material impact on the society. It makes a difference. How did he write The Ways of White Folks? Because when he came back from Russia in ’33, this wealthy California family, the Sullivans, who had a whole line of governors in California, political leaders and so forth, they put him up in Carmel, California in his own cottage for months, to just sit there and write that book.

(SOUND OF WAVES CRASHING)

R. Baxter Miller: He’s got the doves out there, he’s got that wonderful sea breeze blowing into this face.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

R. Baxter Miller: As they say, “It must be nice.”

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Dr. Miller was not under the impression that Langston Hughes felt particularly conflicted about the arrangement.

R. Baxter Miller: Because without Noel Sullivan, this book isn’t there. Without Charlotte Mason, whatever our disagreement, I’m not here. Without Van Vechten, with his racist exoticism, I’m not here. So basically, what you do is—it’s a really interesting thing. You don’t agree with anyone. But when flawed people try to do something, let them.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

He was the only Black writer of note to survive the Great Depression and write onto two more generations.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Langston Hughes continued to write until his death, from complications after surgery for prostate cancer, when he was 66. And yes, for good stretches of his life, he was definitely more middle class, or even well-off, than poor. But in his poems, he always identified with working class people and their struggles. Take this poem from 1922.

Tara Betts: What is it, “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” I know that’s the opening line.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) You hear a mother, loosely based on his own, and she’s speaking vernacular.

Tara Betts: Like, you have the words that are abbreviated with apostrophes. Yes. She says “I’s” instead of “I’ve,” you know.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Not that his own mother necessarily sounded like that.

R. Baxter Miller: His mother didn’t speak vernacular! Come on, man! I mean, he had the power, the ability to translate standard tradition into an African American vernacular that the masses can appreciate.

Tara Betts: It’s also kind of like a window into that private interior that people don’t always get to see.

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) Almost 35 years after Langston Hughes first wrote the poem, a young pastor brought it into mass. It was Mother’s Day. A few months before, his house had been bombed while his wife and then 12-week-old baby were inside. So that day in church, he recited “Mother To Son” for her.

(Recording of Martin Luther King, Jr. reading “Mother to Son” PLAYS)

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

Boards torn up,

Places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

But all the time

I’se been a-climbin’ on,

And reachin’ landin’s,

And turnin’ corners,

And sometimes goin’ in the dark

Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you stop now.

Don’t you set down on the steps

‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

For I’se still goin’, boy,

I’se still climbin’,

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: (NARRATES) This was Let The People Speak, Part II in our series, Poverty’s History. I could not have made this episode without the insight of Dr. Elizabeth McHenry, literary historian at NYU, who wrote the book, Forgotten Readers; Dr. Joe Trotter, historian at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and author of Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America; Dr. Gene Jarrett, dean at the College of Arts and Science at NYU and author of a forthcoming biography about Paul Laurence Dunbar; Dr. R. Baxter Miller, English professor at the University of Georgia and author of the Book Award-winning The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes; and scholar and poet Dr. Tara Betts, author of two full-length poetry collections and several chapbooks.

I’m also hugely indebted to some of the wonderful books and articles I read for this episode. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s book Stony the Road; Addison Gayle, Jr.’s Dunbar biography Oak and Ivy; Langston Hughes’s autobiography The Big Sea; Arnold Rampersad’s article about Langston Hughes’s Fine Clothes to The Jew; Rebecca Panovka’s article about patron Charlotte Mason, titled, “A Different Backstory for Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Barracoon.’” And then there’s the New York Times article about Langston Hughes’s birth year—apparently he was one year older than anyone knew, including himself, which is very confusing. And Isabel Wilkerson’s absolute masterpiece The Warmth of Other Suns.

All Dunbar poems you heard were performed by the legendary Dunbar performer and scholar Dr. Herbert Woodward Martin, emeritus professor at the University of Dayton, except for the “caged bird” one, “Sympathy,” which was performed by NYU educational justice scholar David E. Kirkland.

I’d also like to thank Dr. Alice O’Connor. She’s the director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy at UC Santa Barbara, and she helped identify the right historians to talk to. Then there’s Jess Kovler, who’s helped with fact checking. And I would especially like to thank my editor at the Poetry Foundation, Jim Sitar, who always knows what I’m trying to say before I do. If despite all this help you heard any mistakes, please know that they are all mine.

The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose, Cellophane Sam, Chad Crouch, and David Hilowitz. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.