Langston Hughes Reports From the Spanish Civil War

Literary Hub shares a segment from W. Jason Miller's recent volume about Langston Hughes, published by Reaktion Books Ltd. In this excerpt, readers encounter Hughes in his role as a journalist during the Spanish Civil War. "Canceling a 60-day tour through Russia that he was slated to lead," Miller explains, "Langston Hughes left to cover the Spanish Civil War on June 30th, 1937." More: 

The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper sent him abroad to write “trench-coat prose” about black Americans volunteering in the International Brigades with articles being picked up by other news outlets such as Cleveland’s Call-post and Globe magazine.

Hughes’s 22 articles covered an angle no one else in the world was focused on as companies such as the Abraham Lincoln and Washington Brigades were not only integrated but featured Negro commanders leading white troops, “a policy then unheard of in the US Army.” Overcoming outright denials by the US State Department, Hughes struggled to enter Spain in early August, finally securing press credentials through French means.

In lighter moments, Hughes stood among black soldiers such as Thaddeus Battle and Bunny Rucker like a schoolboy hearing gossip about a girl he just met. In fact, his laugh often sounded as if he was being tickled. Staying for five months, housed mostly in the Alianza overlooking Madrid, Hughes took on the imagined voice of one of the international brigades’ black soldiers in two poems written as “Postcard from Spain” (1938) and “Letter from Spain” (1937).

Addressed to fictional family members back home in Alabama, the poems are dated and signed “Johnny.” The letter imagines befriending a “Moorish prisoner” who has been duped into fighting for Franco while the postcard exults a newfound feeling of companionship as “Folks over here don’t treat me/ Like white folks used to do.”

Continue reading at Literary Hub.