Langston Hughes's Political Poetry Challenges American Racial Hypocrisy

Langston Hughes's Depression-era poetry and prose directly challenged American racial hypocrisy. His 1932 poem 'Christ in Alabama' — written in the context of the Scottsboro trials and published in Contempo magazine — triggered bomb threats when he read it at the University of North Carolina. His 1935 play 'Mulatto' became Broadway's longest-running play by a Black author to that date. Hughes insisted on using the word 'Negro' with dignity and created cultural vocabulary for resistance that reached mass Black audiences through newspapers.