Bringing Harlem to the Schools: Langston Hughes’s The First Book of Negroes and Crafting a Juvenile Readership

By Jonna Perrillo

Chapter 5 of Educating Harlem examines Langston Hughes’s production of the often-overlooked The First Book of Negroes as a vantage point into how the author transformed ideas, images, and business practices that he developed as a young Harlem Renaissance writer to educate children during the Cold War. Moreover, thinking about the book’s readership provides a view into the politics of the books Harlem and New York City children otherwise were reading in 1950s classrooms. Hughes’s political critiques in The First Books of Negroes dated to some of his most seminal works as a writer in the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout his life and career, Hughes remained committed to the same questions that thrived at the heart of the Renaissance, including: What constitutes black culture and art? What are the responsibilities of the black artist to himself and his or her community? Can cultivating a black readership serve as a pathway to community advancement? And what is the role of a black aesthetic—and the black diaspora—within a larger U.S. culture? Now, he translated these questions into a genre for the people he saw as the most vulnerable and most in need of nuanced and humane accounts of black experience and accomplishment: children.

Langston Hughes

The First Book of Negroes came at an important time in Hughes’s career; in 1953, the year after its publication, he was summoned before the Senate to testify about his ties to communism. In his trial, Hughes deftly explained that he had developed “non-theoretical, non-sectarian” ideas “born out of my own need to find some kind of way of thinking about this whole problem of myself, segregated, poor, colored and how I can adjust to this whole problem of helping to build America when sometimes I cannot even get into a school or a lecture or a concert or . . . library.”[1] Hughes’s testimony captured many of the enduring preoccupations found in his poetry and prose, including his belief that racial oppression was legitimized and entrenched in educational and aesthetic institutions as much as in political ones. The First Book of Negroes embraces the same ideas Hughes professed in his trial. The book’s treatment of “the profitable business” of slavery—a topic that had long challenged black writers when writing for children—offers a powerful critique of the collusion between race and capitalism, as well as a celebration of the aesthetic traditions slavery helped to birth. “Not only did slaves work the fields,” Hughes writes, “but some became fine builders, brick masons, carpenters, and iron smiths,” creators of the distinctive ironwork of New Orleans and Charleston and of slave songs alike. The book’s protagonist Terry Lane hears and relays stories of Ethiopians and Egyptians as great artisans and craftspeople. According to his grandmother, because Europeans were “more interested in conquering people than teaching them,” Africans still had not learned “to build factories or make gunpowder,” and instead called on the great traditions of “civilization” that were integral to the African past.[2] Throughout the book, Hughes offers a compelling narrative of black people who served as aesthetic, cultural, and scientific contributors of a wide range, despite or because of racial oppression.

In the book, Terry Lane embodies African diasporic history, and Harlem appears as the prime ground from which to narrate African and African American history. Terry Lane’s Harlem is a place that many children in the United States would have found appealing. From early on, readers learn that it is the home of famous black Americans such as Joe Louis and Duke Ellington. It is multicultural and multilingual; in stark contrast to the school his cousin Charlene attends in Alabama, Terry’s classmates, like his teachers, are both white and “brown as Terry.” Some of his classmates are Puerto Rican and “just learning English,” but “all of these children are good friends, learning and playing together.”[3] In this sometimes idealized description of Harlem, Hughes corrects absences and silences in historical understanding, and counters one-sided or pathologizing depictions of contemporary urban black life. By highlighting Harlem as both an actual place and an ideal to be sought, Hughes used The First Book of Negroes to provide readers with a new vision of black identity and social politics.

In his interest in textbooks, Hughes echoed a major undercurrent in Harlem education politics and, more specifically, the political activism of black parents and radical educators. Wartime patriotism and the popularity of interculturalism, coupled with ongoing school inequities, focused both groups’ attention on what students read in school. Beginning in the 1940s, Harlem parents worked with and independently of teachers to survey the content of textbooks. Mother Enid Tyler struck much the same chord as Hughes when she testified before the Board of Education (BOE) in 1950, “When I look into textbooks, the manner in which the Negro has been portrayed is that of an inferior personality.”[4] Working at the famed Schomburg library on 135th Street, Augusta Baker supported parents and pressed for better inclusion of black authors’ work in the curriculum, calling on many of the arguments about black representation from the Harlem Renaissance and imbuing them with a wartime flavor. She argued that “books play an important part in combatting or fostering racial prejudice, and no one working with books and children will deny the powerful influence of the printed word on them. . . . The time has come to . . . show the Negro in his true light—giving freely of his gifts and asking for nothing in return except a chance to live harmoniously and decently with others.”[5] From books, Baker contended, children stood to learn courage and the skills of citizenship.

Since the First Book was a trade book that read like a social studies text (rather than a textbook), its best chance stood in its being adopted by school librarians. Then, teachers could read or assign the book to their classes. In the decade following the book’s publication, letters that Hughes received from students prove that this happened with frequency. Fourth–grader Emily Elefant wrote to Hughes to tell him that her teacher assigned her to read The First Book after she gave a report on Harriet Tubman for her class; Elefant confided, “I am glad she did because this way I learned about great American Negroes in our time.”[6] At Public School (PS) 29 in Queens, a fourth-grade class wrote to Hughes to let him know that they used the First Book as their source text for a play they wrote for Negro History Week.[7] After Hughes spoke about the First Book at PS 184 in Harlem in January 1953, many fifth-grade students wrote to him to tell him that they and their class were saving their money to buy the book for their school library and for themselves.[8]

Simultaneously, Hughes’s other works were taught across grade levels. One Harlem junior high school teacher sent Hughes her students’ writing in response to a column he wrote in the New York Post, “Fray or Pray?” Most of the students argued for fighting. Seventh-grader Joyce Rembert wrote, “I would go with flay [sic] because if they, the white people fight us, we can fight them back too. . . . We could picket stores and get dogs of our own. Build our own stores, schools.”[9] “I say violence because I do not believe in a person or persons who believe in no non-violence,” classmate Mary Smallwood concurred, “because in someway [sic] or other you have to take up for yourself.”[10] According to Harlem students, their self-image was vastly different and more civil rights–focused than it was when Hughes wrote “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” nearly forty years earlier. And Hughes’s own writing, he was delighted to see, played no small part in bringing about the change. “I found the resulting student essays most intriguing . . . and I must admit that I sometime feel that a little fraying might make the speed of desegregation less deliberate,” Hughes wrote to teacher Nancy Bowe.[11]

At the heart of the Harlem Renaissance existed a belief that images mattered and that changing the cultural images of black Americans and creating what Hughes termed in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” as “racial art” could lead to society’s changed treatment of them. For children, he argued, these images took on particular import. When students only saw in their civics textbooks “Negro neighborhoods as the worst quarters in our cities” and in their history texts “the backwardness of the South but none of its amazing progress in only three score years of freedom,” both white and black people believed that the images represented blanket fact.[12] In his books written for young readers Hughes produced an image of black Americans—young and old, renowned and ordinary—as talented, high achieving, and vital contributors to American culture. In characters such as Terry Lane, whose life was far from typical for most Harlem children, readers met a boy who is happy, successful, and aspiring, despite living in a city where “colored people find it difficult to rent a house except in streets where Negroes live.”[13] Children in The First Book of Negroes are shaped by and come to terms with race politics at once, much as Hughes wanted for the readers of the book. It can be easy to dismiss the political importance of these messages over sixty years later, or to see the book as simply an idealistic portrait Hughes created because of the age of his audience. To do so, however, is to misread the importance of The First Book of Negroes as well as its continually adaptive writer, who sought to bring central, long-developing principles of political rights and aesthetic representation to some of the nation’s youngest and most impressionable citizens.

This post is adapted from chapter 8 of Educating Harlem. You can read the entire chapter here.

Jonna Perrillo is an Associate Professor of English Education and an education historian at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is the author of Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity (Chicago, 2012), winner of the AERA New Scholar Award. Her second book, Educating the Enemy: Teaching Germans and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands,​ is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

[1] Testimony of Langston Hughes, before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, Tuesday, March 24, 1953.

[2] Hughes, First Book of Negroes, 12–13, 25. In contrast to the support Franklin Watts showed to Hughes, Henry Holt publishers fired every editor who worked with Hughes on his Montage of a Dream Deferred (1952) and Laughing to Keep from Crying (1952) in response to the trial.

[3] Hughes, First Book of Negroes, 18.

[4] “Address Made at the Meeting of the Board of Education on April 6, 1950, in Re Item #26, Banning Teachers Union,” folder 13, box 2, Charles J. Bensley Papers, 1947–1954, Board of Education of the City of New York Collection (hereafter BOE).

[5] Augusta Baker, “The Negro in Literature,” Child Study 22 (Winter 1944–45): 58–63.

[6] Emily F. Elefant to Langston Hughes, January 22, 1964, folder 3586, box 212, LHP.

[7] Michael Graham to Langston Hughes, February 17, 1965, folder 3672, box 219, LHP.

[8] Shirley Givens to Langston Hughes, January 13, 1953; Irvins Maleare to Langston Hughes, January 13, 1953; and Mildred Clark to Langston Hughes, January 13, 1953, all in folder 3676, box 220, LHP.

[9] Joyce Rembert, “Flay or Pray?” JHS 136, Class 7–4, November 16, 1962, folder 3671, box 219, LHP. The terminology in these letters is confusing because the teacher, students, and Hughes himself go back and forth between using “fray” and “flay.” I have recorded all terms as they are found in the original documents.

[10] Mary Smallwood, “Violence,” JHS 136, Class 7–4, November 15, 1962, folder 3671, box 219, LHP.

[11] Langston Hughes to Nanny Bowe, January 17, 1963, folder 3671, box 219, LHP.

[12] Hughes, “Books and the Negro Child.”

[13] Hughes, First Book of Negroes, 57, 53.