“Aunt Hager Williams stood in her doorway and looked out at the sun. The western sky was a sulphurous yellow and the sun a red ball dropping slowly behind the trees and house-tops.”
Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter, 1930
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In 1883 the United States Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed that everyone, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was entitled to the same treatment in public accommodations. Thus began the humiliating “Jim Crow laws,” which systematically segregated white and Black Americans (especially in the South) until 1965.
Langston Hughes was born in the former enslaving state of Missouri in 1901, part of the second generation to be born since emancipation. He would later be one of six million African Americans who left the Jim Crow South to find work in midwestern and northern cities in what became known as the “Great Migration.”
Langston became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. Known initially for his powerful poetry, Not Without Laughter is his first novel; a semi-autobiographical story of a Black boy growing up in Kansas. It is part coming of age tale, part lasting record of the hard-scrabble lives Black Americans had to build despite discrimination and occasional violence at the hands of whites.
Langston included many perspectives, and shed an essential, first person point of view on what our country was like during that period.