Why We Jam Together Langston Hughes' Works & African American Holiday Celebrations

The one word answer is relevancy.

James Langston Mercer Hughes (1902-1967) emerged-from 1920 'til his untimely death in 1967-as the unchallenged poet laureate of African America.  More, he was honored by his peers (Africana writers in the US, continental Africa, and the Black Diaspora) as the first modern Black freelance writer to earn his living solely by his professional work. 

Hughes was the par-excellence story teller, praise singer, and griot of the Black American people in his day.  His body of work thereby constitutes a popular artistic resource for invoking the cultural memory of the African community in America. 

Accordingly, Hughes' work is a major contribution to African American identity formation.  This identity formation remains critically important within Black America in this era when what Dr. Cornel West, of New York City's Union Theological Seminary, calls: "the Black (American faith-based) prophetic tradition" (and Black identity culture and politics generally) is under assault by a misleading "Post-racial" thrust in the U.S. public square.   

More importantly Hughes' work takes his audience immediately into the life of Africans in America over time.

This said Hughes' elevation of African American life through Black literature, and creative production generally, takes his audience face-to-face with the national-popular history of a people's struggle to be free (on ever higher levels of development) without it needing to be mediated through ice cold facts and dates.

In Hughes, African American men, women, and youth come alive in their diverse strivings not matched by straight historiography.

For Kuumba Calendar, then, Langston Hughes' creative production work is a resource to build on and not merely a reference library somewhere collecting dust on a shelf. More, it is a basis for providing a mode of much needed African American pastoral care (which Kuumba Calendar has taken up as our overall cause, reason for being, and partial foundation-emergent as we are as a faith-based creative publishing and performance arts ministry).

Note: By pastoral care we mean, given our African American identity formation context, Kuumba Calendar aims at the cultivation of African American souls i.e., the institutionalized exhortation that Africans in America (individually and collectively) accept their God given identity and history as a distinctive people in U.S. society and the world and be themselves.

Respectfully submitted: Pastor Joel Washington (Khunanpu Sangoma), Special Transitional Pastor for African Descent Congregational Renewal, Reformation Church-Chicago ("Young Barack Obama's community organizing sanctuary") & Kuumba-Chicago Blogger