Langston Hughes

How are the Black Arts Movement and Hip-Hop connected to one another.

Langston Hughes was a Pioneer in the Harlem Renaissance. As Du Bose Heyward wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in 1926:

Langston Hughes, although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life. . . . It is, however, as an individual poet, not as a member of a new and interesting literary group, or as a spokesman for a race that Langston Hughes must stand or fall. . . . Always intensely subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfaltering musical sense, Langston Hughes has given us a 'first book' that marks the opening of a career well worth watching.

Langston Hughes was criticized early for his views on black life in the 1920s. He wrote about being a poor man in the poor part of the cities, which was not how African Americans wanted to be represented, especially during a time when black people were being noticed as a people in America. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. This contributed especially to the rap music movement by showing other people that they can express what they are feeling in song rather than poetry which people didn't want to read anymore. Although the rap movement didn't start until around 1970 and Langston Hughes did most of his work in the 1950s, he became a vital factor into being a predecessor of rap music.