The Metro: A new book details the political mind of poet Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes is one of the most recognized names in American literature, and that celebration came with a cost.

The Hughes most people know has been made comfortable. Sanitized and stripped of his edges. As a writer, he explored ideas that democracy in America had yet to be achieved.

Hughes championed that Black Americans practicing respectability politics was itself a form of political control.

He wrote about it. He lived it. In his own life, he faced the impossible choice that respectability politics always demands: your safety or your principles. Your platform or your truth.

Randal Maurice Jelks is a professor, documentary producer, and award-winning author. His new book is “My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy.” Jelks strips away the veneer placed on Hughes’s legacy to reveal the radical, clear-eyed democratic thinker underneath.

For those of us in Detroit, a city that has built its own armor out of necessity, that has dressed for work and maintained its properties and measured its words as a matter of survival, this book is not just about Langston Hughes. This book speaks to every Black family that had to decide what parts of themselves to show and which parts to hide.

Dr. Randal Maurice Jelks joined The Metro to talk about the book and the audacity of Hughes to write truth to power.