1936 photo by Carl Van Vechten February 1, 1902| |Died||May 22,
1967 New York City, New York, |Occupation||poet, columnist,
dramatist, essayist, lyricist, novelist| |Ethnicity||African
American, White American and Native American| James Mercer
Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an
American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and
columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new
literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader
of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period
that "the negro was in vogue" which was later paraphrased as
"when Harlem was in vogue". Ancestry and childhood Both of
Hughes' paternal great-grandmothers were African-American and
both of his paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners
of Kentucky. One of these men was Sam Clay, a Scottish-American
whiskey distiller of Henry County and supposedly a relative of
Henry Clay, and the other was Silas Cushenberry, a Jewish-
American slave trader of Clark County. Hugh