Langston Hughes' Home | 20 E. 127th St.

Walk east on W. 125th St. towards Lenox Ave. Turn left on 5th Ave, then make a right onto E. 127th St. Walk partway down the block to Langston Hughes’ brownstone (20 E. 127th St.).

By Nicole Gervasio

Langston Hughes, an African American poet, novelist, and activist, lived in this brownstone from 1948 until his death in 1967. In his poetry, Hughes captures the experience of surviving under the pressure of multiply overlapping oppressions in the U.S. On his father’s side, his great-grandmothers had been slaves, and his great-grandfathers were Southern white slave-owners. A light-skinned Black man, he wrote about passing as white. Believed to be bisexual like his confidante, Zora Neale Hurston, he also explored the social pressure to pass as straight in order to gain acceptance in society.

His six-line poem, “To F.S.,” is thought to be addressed to Ferdinand Smith, a Jamaican sailor with whom he fell in love and kept in touch for thirty years:

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There is nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began, —
I loved my friend.

While Hurston went to Barnard, Hughes dropped out of Columbia after one brief year, unable to endure the racial discrimination rampant at our university in that era. His poetry is remarkable for its historical prescience. Now we’ll read his poem, “Kids Who Die,” to commemorate the young victims of racially motivated murder who have occupied U.S. headlines in recent years.

This is for the kids who die,
Black and white,
For kids will die certainly.
The old and rich will live on awhile,
As always,
Eating blood and gold,
Letting kids die.

Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi
Organizing sharecroppers
Kids will die in the streets of Chicago
Organizing workers
Kids will die in the orange groves of California
Telling others to get together
Whites and Filipinos,
Negroes and Mexicans,
All kinds of kids will die
Who don’t believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment
And a lousy peace.

Of course, the wise and the learned
Who pen editorials in the papers,
And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names
White and black,
Who make surveys and write books
Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,
And the sleazy courts,
And the bribe-reaching police,
And the blood-loving generals,
And the money-loving preachers
Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,
Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets
To frighten the people—
For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—
And the old and rich don’t want the people
To taste the iron of the kids who die,
Don’t want the people to get wise to their own power,
To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together

Listen, kids who die—
Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you
Except in our hearts
Maybe your bodies’ll be lost in a swamp
Or a prison grave, or the potter’s field,
Or the rivers where you’re drowned like Leibknecht
But the day will come—
You are sure yourselves that it is coming—
When the marching feet of the masses
Will raise for you a living monument of love,
And joy, and laughter,
And black hands and white hands clasped as one,
And a song that reaches the sky—
The song of the life triumphant
Through the kids who die.

The brief list of names included in this memory walk cannot begin to cover all the new cases of unarmed Black Americans killed by police as well as white supremacists. But in 2015, when this walk was first created, we strove to remember many recent deaths that had spurred the Black Lives Matter movement. Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old African American, was racially profiled and killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood vigilante, in Florida in 2012; Zimmerman was acquitted of both murder and a hate crime.

Another police officer, Darren Wilson, shot Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old African American, twelve times for stealing a box of cigarillos in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014; Wilson was also acquitted for murder.

In 2015, in Baltimore, Maryland, police used such excessive force when arresting and transporting Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old Black man, that he lapsed into a coma from fatal spinal injuries within an hour and a half of his arrest. The officer who mishandled his arrest and drove the van was acquitted in June 2016 of both manslaughter and second-degree murder charges.

In June 2015, the white supremacist Dylann Roof, shot nine parishioners attending church in Charleston, South Carolina. One of the victims, twenty-six-year-old Tywanza Sanders, was a poet himself; he died protecting his mother. Roof is only twenty-three years old himself; in April 2017, he was sentenced to nine consecutive life sentences, three consecutive 30-year sentences, and the death penalty after pleading guilty to nine counts of murder, three attempted murder charges, and one unlawful weapons charge.

The last casualty added to this list by July 2015 was Sandra Bland, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman in a small town in Texas who died in her jail cell; the circumstances of her purported suicide were never clarified. Her arrest started with a petty traffic ticket, which she reacted to with exasperation. “You asked me what was wrong, and I told you,” she told the officer. He then escalated their altercation by pulling her out of her car. He refused to hear her voice, no matter how angrily it told the truth, shamed him for being “fucking scared of a female,” or screamed as he subdued her in the name of the “lawful order” he claimed to represent. The full police tape of her arrest has been made public. On June 19, 2017, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law the Sandra Bland Act, which makes new mental health provisions for subjects in custody but does not curb law enforcement and racial profiling.

This brownstone, which housed the poet who accounted for and foresaw further white-on-Black violence, is now occupied by the I, Too Arts Collective, a nonprofit offering free literary arts programming. Previously, the house had gone on the market twice for $1 million, in a neighborhood where the average household income is $39,000.

Click here to listen to Langston Hughes read his poem, "I, Too," the namesake for the neighborhood arts collective now based in his former home.