He was an antiracist, a fighter, and a Black communist. Langston Hughes (1901-1967) both reflected and shaped the history of his time. Promoting multiracial unity and internationalism, Hughes serves as an inspiration for antiracists and communists everywhere.
A fighter
A key figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Hughes moved to the left during the “red decade” of the 1930s, when he worked tirelessly with the Communist Party (CPUSA) to free the Scottsboro Boys—nine Black youths falsely accused of raping two white women—from legal lynching (“Scottsboro, Ltd.”). He hailed Communist Party led multiracial unionism (“Open Letter to the South”), praised the uprooting of racism in Soviet Central Asia, and reported on the multiracial Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (I Wonder as I Wander).
He later nurtured the militancy of the Civil Rights Movement (“Freedom Train”) and the emergence of post-colonial African literature. While Hughes’s political organizing was primarily in his writing, his life was threatened when he toured the U.S. South giving poetry readings in support of the Scottsboro Boys, and he was almost killed by a fascist-fired mortar shell in Spain.
Poems of communist virtues
The first Black U.S. author to make a living entirely from his writings, Hughes published some 35 books, ranging from novels and short stories to plays, autobiography to journalism, musicals to children’s books. His Chicago Defender newspaper columns featuring the forthright opinions of the fictional Harlem worker Jesse B. Semple (e.g., Simple Speaks His Mind) cemented his popularity.  Above all, Hughes was known for the hundreds of poems he penned voicing the anger, bravery, and wry irony of Black U.S. workers.
He also promoted the necessity for multiracial working-class internationalism. “Dreams” are, for Hughes, not idle imaginings, but expressions of actual human need.  If indefinitely “deferred,” however, a dream either “dr[ies] up like a raisin in the sun” or “explode[s]” (“Harlem”).  (The poem inspired the title of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun.) What is needed is a world “Where black or white, / Whatever race you be, / Will share the bounties of the earth/ And every man is free” (“I Dream a World”).
Bosses censor his revolutionary side
What most people know—or think they know—about Hughes, however, has been warped by anticommunism. Grilled about some of his revolutionary poems of the 1930s (“Goodbye, Christ,” “Good Morning, Revolution!”, and “Put Another ‘S’ in the U.S.A.”) he was hauled before Joseph McCarthy’s notorious Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in 1954. Hughes never “named names” or repudiated the Communist Party.  But he increasingly engaged in self-censorship, ventriloquizing his sharpest criticisms of ruling-class red-baiting through the sardonic commentary of Jesse B. Semple and excluding all his Depression-era pro-communist poetry from the 1957 edition of his Selected Poems. Both Hughes the man and Hughes the poet were victims of the Cold War.
The political censorship of Hughes’s pro-communism still continues in the selection of Hughes’s works in the textbooks used in high school and college classrooms.  The standard anthologies feature almost exclusively his 1920s blues- and jazz-inflected poems, such as “The Weary Blues,” and works affirming the value and beauty of Negro identity, such as the essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” the short story “The Blues I’m Playing,” and the poems “Mother to Son” (“Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”) and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (“My soul has grown deep like the rivers”).  
The effect of selecting such texts and excluding his pro-communist, anti-capitalist works is to convert Hughes’s revolutionary, class-based politics into a politics of Black cultural nationalism that overlooks the grounding of racism in capitalist social relations. The pro-communist Hughes is then made safe for the capitalist classroom. The Hughes who celebrated the achievements of Soviet socialism is expelled.
Weaknesses of old movement
Because of his closeness to the CPUSA, however, Hughes’s works reflect not just its strengths but also its shortcomings. For instance, his ambiguous relationship to U.S. patriotism is linked to the CPUSA’s view (especially pronounced during the era of the Popular Front Against Fascism (1936-1945)—of communism as “twentieth-century Americanism.” In the frequently anthologized “I Too,” the “darker brother” proclaims that he’ll eventually be invited to the table from which he has been excluded because “they’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed . . . I, too, am America.”
In “Let America Be America Again,” there is a tug-of-war between two speakers, one readily assimilated to the American Dream, the other voicing the standpoint of those historically excluded (“the Negro . . . the poor white, . . . the red man . . . the immigrant”) who proclaim, “America never was America to me.” But the poem ends, “And yet I swear this oath—America will be!”
Here a liberal politics of inclusion—premised upon the extension of U.S. “democracy”—substitutes for the revolutionary view that U.S. capitalism is founded upon racist exploitation and division, and that only proletarian revolution can produce the “dream” of a better world.
Progressive Labor Party (its founding members broke away from the CPUSA in the early 1960s) has learned from the mistakes of the old  communist movement. It is now clear that in the contradiction between nationalism and internationalism, communists must denounce nationalism in all forms. Nationalist politics only serve the interests of the  capitalist ruling class.
Barack Obama’s 2009 Inauguration speech is a case in point. Quoting Hughes, he asserted, “I too, am America,” as well as in Martin Luther King’s riffing on “Let America Be America Again” in several key speeches (Miller 2016, 2020).
Clearly, ruling class defenders have no trouble co-opting ideas when it suits them.
Undying commitment
Despite these ideological contradictions, Hughes’s principal legacy is an undying commitment to the struggle against racism and the fight for an egalitarian communist future, one in which the blood-sucking “life robbers” of colonialism and imperialism will be overthrown by the “Red Armies of the international proletariat / Their faces, black, white, olive, yellow, brown . . . / Rais[ing] the blood-red flag that / Never will come down!” (“Always the Same”). Hughes was a poet laureate for the workers of the world.