Langston Hughes Quotes That We All Want In 2025

UPDATED: 5:30 p.m. ET, Jan. 31, 2025

Saturday marks what would have been the 124th birthday of Langston Hughes, who just isn’t solely proof that the energy of the written phrase has persevered all through historical past, but in addition, arguably, that the literary contributions through the world-famous Harlem Renaissance modified the publishing sport perpetually.

Hughes was one of many undisputed leaders of that group of famend Black icons, together with acclaimed musicians, dancers, artists, vogue designers and stylists, writers, politicians and students. Due to this fact, it’s becoming that Hughes’ birthday would coincide with the beginning of Black Historical past Month, perpetually an unavoidable collision of Black excellence to kick off 28 full days of cultural commemoration.

And what higher method to mark the beginning of Black Historical past Month than by celebrating Hughes’ phrases in print in addition to these he spoke throughout his life, which started on Feb. 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. Regardless of the shape by which his phrases have been eternally preserved, Hughes’ quotes are one thing all of us want, particularly in 2025.

Hughes’ highway to Harlem — the place he would grow to be a pioneering author and poet alongside the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Wright and plenty of others — is known.

Portrait of Langston Hughes. | Supply: Lincoln College / Getty

Hughes was first revealed in 1921 “The Disaster,” which was the official journal of the Nationwide Affiliation for the Development of Coloured Individuals, which went on to grow to be extra generally known as the NAACP. He would go on to launch a group of poems all all through the Nineteen Twenties that included “The Weary Blues, “Tremendous Garments to the Jew,” “The Negro Mom and Different Dramatic Recitation,” “Expensive Pretty Dying” and “The Dream Keeper and Different Poems.”

He additionally wrote novels and quick tales like “Not With out Laughter,” “Laughing to Preserve from Crying,” “Easy Speaks His Thoughts” and, considered one of his most well-known, “The Methods of White People.”

Hughes’ work was deeply political and unapologetically Black, as proven by the next temporary passage that was revealed in The Nation in 1926.

“The youthful Negro artists who create now intend to precise our particular person dark-skinned selves with out concern or disgrace. If white persons are happy we’re glad,” Hughes wrote on the time. “If they don’t seem to be, it doesn’t matter. We all know we’re lovely. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If coloured persons are happy we’re glad. If they don’t seem to be, their displeasure doesn’t matter both. We construct our temples for tomorrow, robust as we all know how, and we stand on prime of the mountain free inside ourselves.”

Many African American visionaries, together with Hughes, uprooted themselves from the US and moved to Paris as a result of heated racial local weather in America. They felt like their work was extra appreciated in Europe than at house and believed that Paris afforded them extra alternatives to additional their careers.

Hughes’ former house in Harlem was in the end designated to be a nationwide landmark; considered one of 22 American websites with Black cultural significance that the African American Cultural Heritage Motion Fund has actively labored to guard and protect.

Hughes died Could 22, 1967, following problems after stomach surgical procedure associated to prostate most cancers. He was 65 years previous.

Hughes’ legacy nonetheless lives on. His work has been featured in movies, performs and music and stays a staple in American tradition, particularly within the Black group.

See a few of his most iconic phrases beneath, that are nonetheless very a lot related in 2025.