Project Background

Everything Begins Before

Before the Harlem Renaissance came the New Negro Renaissance, which began with the return of the all-black 15th New York National Guard Unit from France in February, 1919. As David Levering Lewis reports in When Harlem Was In Vogue, the valor of the Hell Fighters was nothing less than legendary. Thirteen hundred black men and eighteen white officers moved in "metronome step….a solid thirty-five-foot square of massed men, sergeants two paces in front of their platoons, lieutenants three paces ahead of sergeants, captains five paces ahead. out of Thirty-fourth Street into Fifth Avenue. It was the formation preferred by the French Army, under which the "Hell Fighters" had served for nearly a year with the 16th and 161st divisions of the French Army.

Officially, they were still the United States 369th Infantry Regiment, the only unit to be completely amalgamated into foreign command. They were also the only American unit awarded the Croix de Guerre, the French High Command's supreme mark of honor, the longest to remain under fire, and the first American regiment to lead the march to the Rhine. In short: they were heroes. They were the New Negroes, the pride of the Race. The emotion of the moment was best recorded by James Weldon Johnson, as reported in the New York Age, one of the leading African American newspapers of the day:
The Fifteenth furnished the first sight that New York has had of seasoned soldiers in marching order. There was no militia smartness about their appearance; their "tin hats" were battered and rusty and the shiny newness worn off their bayonets, but they were men who had gone through the terrible hell of war and come back.

Enter Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance

Like the Hell Fighters, thousands of other African American soldiers, the returned to America with a dignity that was soon to the pervade the African American community. What the New Negro needed was a new definition befitting the twentieth-century, as well as the cosmopolitan mind set of growing black communities in the urban North. What was needed also was to be defined from within, a definition that would come through the African American community, "by us, for us, and about us."

The goal of redefining the New Negro fell to the younger generation of African Americans, women and men two generations from slavery, too young to have served in the war and most-like Langston Hughes--with college degrees. The task of younger Harlem Renaissance intelligentsia--Modernists such as writers Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Jesse Redmon Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher and visual artists, such as William Johnson, Augusta Savage, and Archibald Motley--was to redefine the African American community in terms of class, as well as race; refute 19th-century representations of black Americans, both popular and academic; and reclaim African American history in terms of the African culture and diaspora.

Enter the Langston Hughes Young Writers Project

It is in this spirit that we launch the LANGSTON HUGHES YOUNG WRITERS PROJECT, a city-wide network of innovative, interdisciplinary student-centered activities centered on language arts and creative problem solving. While the goal of LANGSTON HUGHES YOUNG WRITERS PROJECT is to introduce younger learners to the life and literature of Langston Hughes, its larger goal is to encourage initiative of those students who wish to respond with creative works of their own and facilitate artistic imagination beyond the initial stages and toward the craft of creative expression.

Schools targeted for participation in LANGSTON HUGHES YOUNG WRITERS PROJECT activities represent a broad spectrum of public and private instructional venues. Wherever possible, schools have been selected in order to build on existing programs and/or efforts. As a group, these schools demonstrate the range of instructional diversity in works of Langston Hughes; facilitate activities both in and beyond the classroom; and provide models for interdisciplinary instruction of language for future faculty research. Beyond the immediate impact on local schools, students, teachers in the Cleveland community, the activities involved are designed to instruct critical thinking skills; provide insight into self-directed, self-initiated learning for optimum life skills development; and honor the memory and unique contributions of Langston Hughes.