Langston Hughes wrote poems that sounded like jazz, stories that read like blues, and essays that cut like razors — all while navigating the impossible demands placed on a Black artist in mid-century America. He was expected to be a spokesman for an entire race, a revolutionary by the left, a patriot by the right, and respectable by the Black middle class. He wore every mask the moment required and kept his private self hidden behind them all.

This episode traces Hughes from his nomadic childhood through the Harlem Renaissance, the controversial Soviet trip, the McCarthy hearings, and the decades of writing that made him the most beloved and burdened poet in African American literature.

• Hughes’s lonely childhood and the poem left on a dinner table that launched his career
• The Harlem Renaissance, the jazz poetry revolution, and the manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
• The Soviet trip, the McCarthy committee testimony, and the political pressures that constrained him
• The masks Hughes wore — public spokesman, private man — and the cost of being Black America’s poet