Five years ago University of Chicago Laboratory Schools drama teacher John Biser was talking about Langston Hughes with some parents at a school performance. The couple, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who’d been involved with the Weathermen in the 1960s, mentioned that Hughes had been a guest teacher at the schools in the 40s–a time when the poet was being blacklisted as an atheist and a communist.
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Intrigued, Biser began reading Hughes biographies. “In every case, a good deal was made of his time here,” he says. The archives steered him to a 1948 front-page Chicago Tribune article describing an incident at North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, where Hughes had been asked to speak. “During the 30s he had gone through a communist phase, as just about all writers did at the time,” says Biser. “He’d written poems like ‘Goodbye Christ’ and ‘Put One More S in the USA,’ which even mentioned the names of communist leaders in flattering terms. Even though it had been a good 12 years since he’d written and repudiated that, they had canceled his lecture. Many schools and institutions were doing the same thing. He considered his career as a teacher and lecturer, particularly in Chicago, dead.”
But the Lab Schools, an institution that prided itself on being progressive, welcomed him. During the spring of 1949 he taught all levels, from kindergarten to 12th grade, as poet in residence. “In one of the letters to Arna he says that ‘I’m a member of the unified arts department, and that means I teach everything,’” says Biser. “In the middle school he had them experiment with finding rhythms from everyday life, like the sound of brushing teeth or hopscotch, and then showed them how language had the same type of rhythm.”
But language issues are something that Biser still deals with. During his research he learned that Hughes encouraged his students to recite his poems in the black dialect he was using at the time. “He was saying that nothing was wrong with black culture, and that he didn’t write his poems one way to have you speak them another,” he says. Hughes took some flak from parents for his views. “In one letter he says that all of the leading Negro families send their children to the Lab Schools, and he’s always bumping into the parents in the hallway. They are always asking him about the dialect and why he’s portraying them in stereotypical ways.
