Langston Hughes testified March 24, 1953, before the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The subcommittee was led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., but the chairman was absent that day. Among Hughes’ interrogators were Sen. Everett M. Dirksen, R-Ill.; Roy Cohn, chief counsel for the subcommittee; and David Schine, chief consultant for the subcommittee.

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Cohn: Let me ask you this: Have you ever been a communist?

Hughes: No, sir, I am not. I presume by that you mean a Communist Party member, do you not?

Cohn: I mean a communist.

Hughes: I would have to know what you mean by your definition of communism.

Cohn: Have you ever been a believer in communism?

Hughes: I have never been a believer in communism or a Communist Party member.

Cohn: Have you ever been a believer in socialism?

Hughes: My feeling, sir, is that I have believed in the entire philosophies of the left at one period in my life, including socialism, communism, Trotskyism. All “isms” have influenced me one way or another, and I can not answer to any specific “ism,” because I am not familiar with the details of them and have not read their literature.

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Cohn: Let us do it this way. Did you write something called “Scottsboro Limited”?

Hughes: Yes, sir, I did.

Cohn: Do you not think that follows the Communist Party line very well?

Hughes: It very well might have done so, although I am not sure I ever knew what the Communist Party line was since it very often changed.

Cohn: Mr. Hughes, when you wrote “Scottsboro Limited,” did you believe in what you were saying in that poem?

Hughes: No, sir, not entirely, because I was writing in characters.

Cohn: It is your testimony you were writing in character and what was said did not represent your beliefs?

Hughes: No, sir. You cannot say I don’t believe, if I may clarify my feeling about creative writing, that when you make a character, a Klansman, for example, as I have in some of my poems, I do not, sir.

Cohn: How about “Scottsboro Limited,” specifically? Do you believe in the message carried by that work?

Hughes: I believe that some people did believe in it at the time.

Cohn: Did you believe in it?

Hughes: Did I?

Cohn: Did you personally believe? You can answer that. Let me read you, ”Rise, workers and fight, audience, fight, fight, fight, fight, the curtain is a great red flag rising to the strains of the Internationale.” That is pretty plain, is it not?

Hughes: Yes, indeed it is.

Cohn: Did you believe in that message when you wrote, it?

Hughes: No, sir.

Cohn: You did not believe it?

Hughes: No, sir.

Cohn: It was contrary to your beliefs, is that right?

Hughes: Sir, I don’t think you can get a yes or no answer entirely to any literary question, so I give you —

Cohn: I am trying, Mr. Hughes, because I think you have gone pretty far in some of these things, and I think you know pretty well what you did. When you wrote something called ”Ballads of Lenin,” did you believe that when you wrote it?

Hughes: Believe what, sir?

Cohn: “Comrade Lenin of Russia speaks from marble:

“On guard with the workers forever —

“The world is our room!”

Hughes: That is a poem. One can not state one believes every word of a poem.

Cohn: I do not know what one can say. I am asking you specifically do you believe in the message carried and conveyed in this poem?

Hughes: It would demand a great deal of discussion. You cannot say yes or no.

Cohn: You cannot say yes or no?

Hughes: One can if one wants to confuse one’s opinions.

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Sen. Dirksen: The reason I was curious about your asking for the book on which to hold your hand (the Bible) and may I say, sir, from my familiarity with the Negro people for a long time that they are innately a very devout and religious people — this is the first paragraph of the poem (“Goodbye Christ”):

“Listen, Christ, you did all right in your day, I reckon

“But that day is gone now.

“They ghosted you up a swell story, too,

“And called it the Bible, but it is dead now.

“The popes and the preachers have made too much money from it. They have sold you to too many.”

Do you think that Book is dead?

Hughes: No, sir, I do not. That poem, like that handbill, is an ironical and satirical poem.

Sen. Dirksen: It was not so accepted, I fancy, by the American people.

Hughes: It was accepted by a large portion of them and some ministers and bishops understood the poem and defended it.

Sen. Dirksen: I know many who accepted the words for what they seem to convey.

Hughes: That is exactly what I meant to say in answer to the other gentleman’s question, that poetry may mean many things to many people.

Sen. Dirksen: We will put all of it in the record, of course, but I will read you the third stanza.

“Goodbye, Christ Jesus, Lord of Jehovah,

“Beat it on away from here now

“Make way for a new guy with no religion at all,

“A real guy named Marx communism, Lenin Peasant, Stalin worker, me.”

How do you think the average reader would take that?

Hughes: Sir, the average reader is very likely to take poetry, if they take it at all — and they usually don’t take it at all — they are very likely often not to understand it, sir. I have found it very difficult myself to understand a great many poems that one had to study in school. If you will permit me, I will explain that poem to you from my viewpoint.

Sen. Dirksen: Of course, when all is said and done a poem like this must necessarily speak for itself, because notwithstanding what may have been in your mind, what inhibitions, whether you crossed your fingers on some of those words when you wrote them, its impact on the thinking of the people is finally what counts.

May I ask, do you write poetry merely for the amusement and the spiritual and emotional ecstasy that it develops, or do you write it for a purpose?

Hughes: You write it out of your soul and you write it for your own individual feeling of expression.

First, sir, it does not come from yourself in the first place. It comes from something beyond oneself, in my opinion.

Sen. Dirksen: You think this is a providential force?

Hughes: There is something more than myself in the creation of everything that I do. I believe that is in every creation, sir.

Sen. Dirksen: So you have no objective in writing poetry? It is not a message that you seek to convey to somebody? You just sit down and the rather ethereal thoughts suddenly come upon you?

Hughes: I have often written poetry in that way, and there are on occasions times when I have a message that I wish to express directly and that I want to get to people.

Sen. Dirksen: Do you know whether this poem was reprinted in quantities and used as propaganda leaflets by the Communist Party?

Hughes: No, sir, it was not. It was reprinted in quantities as far as I know, and used as a propaganda leaflet by the organizations of Gerald L. K. Smith and the organization of extreme anti-Negro forces in our country, and I have attempted to recall that poem. I have denied permission for its publication over the years. I have explained the poem for 22 years, I believe, or 20 years, in my writings in the press, and my talks as being a satirical poem, which I think a great pity that anyone should think of the Christian religion in those terms, and great pity that sometimes we have permitted the church to be disgraced by people who have used it as a racketeering force. That poem is merely the story of racketeering in religion and misuse of religion as might have been seen through the eyes at that time of a young Soviet citizen who felt very cocky and said to the whole world, ”See what people do for religion. We don’t do that.” I write a character piece sometimes as in a play. I sometimes have in a play a villain. I do not believe in that villain myself.

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Cohn: Do you remember writing this: ”Good morning, Revolution. You are the very best friend I ever had. We are going to pal around together from now on.”

Hughes: Yes, sir, I wrote that.

Cohn: Did you write this: ”Put one more ‘S’ in the USA to make it Soviet. The USA when we take control will be the USSA then.”

Hughes: Yes, sir, I wrote that.

Cohn: Were you kidding when you wrote those things? What did you mean by those?

Hughes: Would you like me to give you an interpretation of that?

Cohn: I would be most interested.

Hughes: Very well. Will you permit me to give a full interpretation of it?

Cohn: Surely.

Hughes: All right, sir. To give a full interpretation of any piece of literary work one has to consider not only when and how it was written, but what brought it into being. The emotional and physical background that brought it into being.

I, sir, was born in Joplin, Missouri. I was born a Negro. From my very earliest childhood memories, I have encountered very serious and very hurtful problems.

One of my earliest childhood memories was going to the movies in Lawrence, Kansas, where we lived, and there was one motion picture theater, and I went every afternoon. It was a nickelodeon, and I had a nickel to go. One afternoon I put my nickel down and the woman pushed it back and she pointed to a sign. I was about 7 years old.

Cohn: I do not want to interrupt you. I do want to say this. I want to save time here. I want to concede very fully that you encounter oppression and denial of civil rights. Let us assume that, because I assume that will be the substance of what you are about to say. To save us time, what we are interested in determining for our purpose is this: Was the solution to which you turned that of the Soviet form of government?

Hughes: Sir, you said you would permit me to give a full explanation.

Cohn: I was wondering if we could not save a little time because I want to concede the background which you wrote it from was the background you wanted to describe.

Hughes: I would much rather preserve my reputation and freedom than to save time.

Cohn: Take as long as you want.

Hughes: The woman pushed my nickel back and pointed to a sign beside the box office, and the sign said something, in effect, ”Colored not admitted.” It was my first revelation of the division between the American citizens. My playmates who were white and lived next door to me could go to that motion picture and I could not. I could never see a film in Lawrence again, and I lived there until I was 12 years old.

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Cohn: What were your views in 1949 when you said, “If the 12 Communists are sent to jail, in a little while they will send Negroes to jail simply for being Negroes and to concentration camps just for being colored”? You have told us you do not feel that way today. When did you change that particular view?

Hughes: You asked two questions. sir. That viewpoint I think grew out of what I had read about Germany, how they began with the communists, and they went on to Jews, and they went on to Negroes, and we had Hitlerism, and that has been a general feeling on the part of some people.

Cohn: You say you changed that view. When did you change that view? This was February 1949. You say you do not feel that way today.

Hughes: The view that Negroes may be sent to jail if communists are?

Cohn: Yes. As a consequence of the conviction of the Communist Party leaders. In other words, a chain set off by the conviction of the Communist Party leaders.

Hughes: Well, it has not happened as yet, and therefore my hope is and my belief is that we can keep it from happening.