Best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes believed in the power of art as resistance. In My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy, Dr. Randal Maurice Jelks traces Hughes’s journey from a childhood  shaped by the wonder of Kansas City to his emergence as a cosmopolitan  witness to modern life. These experiences informed Hughes’s thinking on  art, democracy, and activism.

Jelks shows how Hughes consistently  wrote about democracy from a joyous perspective, even as he confronted  class struggle, human suffering, and political crisis. Hughes made a  deliberate choice to stand on the side of the oppressed, believing that  art should be practiced for the sake of justice and that democracy  itself can be practiced with joy.

Jelks is an award-winning  author, documentary film producer, and professor. He is the author of four books. His writings have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los  Angeles Review of Books, blogs, journals, and periodicals. He will be in  conversation with Dr. Maryemma Graham, distinguished professor emerita  in the KU Department of English and founder of the History of Black  Writing (HBW) in 1983 at the University of Mississippi, which focuses on  literary recovery work in Black studies.

Randal Jelks - "My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy"