Langston Hughes, The Writer’s Position in America

20 East 127 Street, Langston Hughes’ house, 1940. Tax Photograph collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Continuing our celebration of WNYC’s 100th Anniversary and in honor of Black History Month, we present this 1957 recording of Langston Hughes discussing the challenges faced by Black writers from a National Association of Authors panel discussion “The Writer’s Position in America.” The themes he discusses: representation, pigeonholing and lack of intellectual freedom, seem as salient today as they were in 1957.

Langston Hughes was an icon of the Harlem Renaissance, and although best known as a poet and novelist, was also a journalist, a composer and an activist. He was a frequent guest on WNYC radio.

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On July 8, 1924, radio station WNYC made its inaugural broadcast from a studio at the top of the Municipal Building. During 2024, For the Record will celebrate the centennial of one of the nation’s first municipally-owned radio station with a series of articles featuring historical audio recordings from the WNYC collection in the Municipal Archives. 

In 1986 the Municipal Archives acquired a large collection of original WNYC lacquer phono discs and tapes dating back to 1937. These unique audio recordings capture the sounds of a city and a nation through decades of transformations, tribulations, and triumphs in the voices of presidents, dignitaries, world leaders, artistic revolutionaries, musical geniuses, luminaries of the literati, and cultural icons. Outside of the federal government, the WNYC Collection is the largest non-commercial collection of archival audio recordings and ephemera from an individual radio broadcaster. 

The Archives has collaborated with WNYC on a series of projects to reformat this material. Most recently, funding from the Leon Levy Foundation enabled digitization of thousands of hours of audio content that documented political, historical, scientific, and cultural events—both large and small.

Vinyl Rhyme and Lacquered Verse: Celebrating National Poetry Month

Over the last year, thousands of lacquer phono discs from the Municipal Archives WNYC audio collection have been digitized as part of a project supported by a grant from the Leon Levy Foundation to the WNYC Foundation. The discs span from the 1920s to the 1960s, providing a window into mid-20th century life and culture in New York. WNYC, the City's radio station responded to the tumult of this period by becoming a beacon of civilization. In addition to broadcasting musical performances and news programs, WNYC brought discussions and readings of poetry from local and international authors. As the Municipal Archives ingests this collection, both digitally and physically, we invite our patrons to use National Poetry Month to explore our WNYC Radio collection already available online.

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Walt Whitman is a well-known New York poet. Born in West Hills, Long Island in 1819, Whitman is famous for elevating the importance of everyday American life during the 19th century. His influence on American literature has been so vast that he is sometimes referred to simply as ‘America’s Poet.’ Whitman worked on his most famous collection of poems ‘Leaves of Grass’ until his death in 1892, revising it repeatedly after its first publication in 1855.

In 1941, WNYC Radio held their second American Music Festival, a program meant to highlight the multicultural and liberal democratic values of the Americas as compared to totalitarian and fascist powers. The words of Whitman’s poem ‘I Hear America Singing’ from ‘Leaves of Grass’ were put to music and performed live on air:

I Hear America Singing by Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,

The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to no one else,

The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

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The name Langston Hughes is nearly synonymous with the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century. Born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes attended Columbia University before contributing work to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) official magazine, The Crisis. His poems like ‘Harlem,’ or the ‘The Weary Blues,’ helped define poetry for generations of Americans and his works have, in turn, influenced artists ever since. The famous opening lines of ‘Harlem’ “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” and the play that took its title from those lines, continue to reverberate over half a century since his death in 1967. At the 10th American Music Festival, one of his poems ‘A Black Pierrot’ was set to music and performed live:

A Black Pierrot by Langston Hughes

I am a black pierrot: She did not love me,

So I crept away into the night and the night was black, too.

I am a black pierrot: She did not love me,

So I wept until the red dawn dripped blood over the eastern hills

and my heart was bleeding, too.

I am a black pierrot: She did not love me,

So with my once gay colored soul shrunken like a balloon without air,

I went forth in the morning to seek a new brown love.

I went forth in the morning to seek a new brown love.

I went forth in the morning, I went forth in the morning,

I went forth in the morning to seek a new brown love.

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Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia in 1899, Vladimir Nabokov was a poet, teacher, and author who was exiled shortly after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Fleeing ever further west, Nabokov and his family eventually came to America, where he wrote his most famous (or infamous) work, ‘Lolita.’  Writing creatively in several languages and teaching literature in the United States, Nabokov was also widely recognized for his poetry like ‘Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos,’ which has been the subject of intense literary analysis since it was published in 1962. Nabokov was invited to read one of his poems and discuss the art form of poetry in depth on WNYC Radio in 1958. While the following audio recording has the entire poem read by Nabokov, the text is merely the opening paragraph.

An Evening of Russian Poetry (Opening Paragraph) by Vladimir Nabokov

The subject chosen for tonight’s discussion
Is everywhere, though often incomplete:
when their basaltic banks become too steep,
most rivers use a kind of rapid Russian,
and so do children talking in their sleep.
My little helper at the magic lantern,
insert that slide and let the colored beam
project my name or any such-like phantom
in Slavic characters upon the screen.
The other way, the other way. I thank you.

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Thousands of audio recordings like these have been preserved and are now freely accessible online, and thousands more will be added as the project continues. Although more poetry readings and discussions can be found in the WNYC Radio collection, there are many other highlights. An interview with Jackie Robinson at the Apollo 11 ticker-tape parade, a speech by President Eisenhower to the American Legion on the dangers of Communism and Eleanor Roosevelt extolling the virtues of New York City are just some examples of the gems in this collection. Listen to them all now on our digital gallery: https://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/RECORDSPHOTOUNITARC~26~26