After a half-century of secrecy, author Langston Hughes’ testimony to 1950s U.S. Senate witch-hunters has been made public.

The picture it paints of the writer’s Lawrence boyhood is not pretty.

Called upon to defend his art and life amid the anticommunist hysteria of the McCarthy era, Hughes told of his Lawrence childhood and how the discrimination here began to shape his work, political views and perceptions of America.

“It was my first revelation of the division between the American citizens,” Hughes said, according to newly released transcripts of closed-door Senate hearings during the Cold War.

He testified privately on March 24, 1953, before Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, as the committee investigated communists in the U.S. government. Hughes testified at a public hearing two days later.

At both hearings, Hughes denied he had ever been a member of the Communist Party — although he tried to sidestep much of the questioning — and said he had recanted his youthful desire for a Soviet-style government for the United States.

“I have believed in the entire philosophies of the left at one period in my life, including socialism, communism, Trotskyism,” Hughes said at the secret session. “All ‘isms’ have influenced me one way or another.”

Browbeating

Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance author and poet, lived in Lawrence with his grandmother between 1905 and 1913. As an adult, he wrote 16 books of poems, two novels and numerous other works, becoming one of the leading black voices during the Jazz Age.

Some of his early poems revealed a leftist bent that raised the eyebrows of Senate investigators. And he became one of 500 witnesses — including composer Aaron Copland and Eslanda Goode Robeson, the wife of blacklisted actor Paul Robeson — called before McCarthy’s committee in 1953 and 1954.

Poet and author Langston Hughes speaks before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, D.C. He testified March 26, 1953, before the Senate investigations subcommittee that he formerly had been sympathetic to the Soviet form of government, but he said he never had joined the Communist Party. Hughes did not name names.

Thousands of pages of transcripts from the private hearings were unsealed May 5 by the U.S. Senate. The transcripts were released because a 50-year seal that applied to the hearings had expired.

“Anybody who stood up to McCarthy in closed session, and did so articulately, tended not to get called up into the public session,” said Senate associate historian Donald Ritchie, who assembled the 4,000 pages of transcripts. “McCarthy was only interested in the people he could browbeat publicly.”

At a time when many on the left defied the committee or took the Fifth Amendment, Hughes was expected to do the same.

“He was the epitome of the plainspoken man, in a lot of ways,” said Kenneth Wheatley, Lawrence, creator of a Hughes sculpture that will be placed in Buford M. Watson Jr. Park. “He spoke his mind, and he spoke his mind from his own experience.”

But Hughes faltered at the public McCarthy hearings. He told the committee his early writings should be withdrawn from U.S.-sponsored libraries designed to spread pro-American viewpoints abroad.

“I was certainly amazed to hear they were (in the libraries),” Hughes said publicly. “I was surprised, and I would certainly say ‘No,'” they should not be there.

Private opposition

Though he never named names of his radical associates, Hughes’ appearance estranged him from many on the left.

“He was seen as somebody who basically acquiesced in the face of the committee,” said Arnold Rampersad, Hughes’ biographer.

But during private hearings two days before his public airing, Hughes said his writings should stay in the libraries to show the diversity of opinion in the country.

¢ Hughes’ testimony from McCarthy hearing (see Volume 2)¢ More on Hughes

Rampersad, a Stanford University English professor who produced a two-volume biography of Hughes last year, said the new transcripts showed the author was more combative with the McCarthy committee than previously had been believed.

“It showed me,” Rampersad said. “a side of Hughes that I didn’t really know existed: a combative side, his ability to blend a peaceful demeanor with a kind of lawyerly maneuvering, to make sure his position is conserved.”

McCarthy did not attend the March 24 hearing, at which several literary figures — including Hughes and crime novelist Dashiell Hammett — testified. Much of the questioning was handled by Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s 26-year-old chief counsel, and Sen. Everett M. Dirksen, a Republican from Illinois.

Cohn asked Hughes about several of his poems, including “Scottsboro Limited,” a work that decried the trial of nine black Alabama teenagers on gang-rape allegations; “Ballads of Lenin”; and “Goodbye Christ,” which seems to reject religion in favor of Marxism.

“The works which you have named, sir, are not very representative of my literary career,” Hughes told Cohn.

Turned away

Pressed to explain the context of the poems, Hughes described much of his childhood and young adulthood.

In Lawrence, Hughes said, he attended a “nickelodeon” movie theater every afternoon.

One day, Hughes said, “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.’

“My playmates who were white and lived next door to me could go to that motion picture and I could not,” he told the senators. “I could never see a film in Lawrence again, and I lived there until I was 12 years old.”

Lawrence experts familiar with Hughes’ life said they had not heard the movie theater story before.

“I guess I’m not surprised,” said Lawrence historian Steve Jansen. “I know there were ‘colored’ sections in the Bowersock Opera House. In general, segregation was practiced in Lawrence well into the 1960s.”

Bill Tuttle, a Kansas University professor of American studies, helps organize an annual KU conference in Hughes’ honor. Tuttle said the 35 pages of Hughes’ testimony highlighted some old questions.

“There are elements of his identity that people are vague about,” Tuttle said. “One is (Hughes’) sexuality, his sexual orientation, and the other is whether he was a member of the Communist Party. I don’t have definitive answers to either of those questions.”

The end

Rampersad said Hughes’ decision to essentially disown his early writings “was a compromise forced on him.”

“He didn’t totally fall on his face and knees before power,” Rampersad said. “He tried to argue his way out.”

By the time of the McCarthy testimony, the most prolific period of Hughes’ career had passed. But the hearings, and his break with the left, did change the content of the work to come.

“He did not write left-wing or socialist poetry anymore, but that time had passed in any case. It didn’t hurt his work,” Rampersad said.

“It pushed him more, not that he needed pushed, into the Civil Rights movement as a poet. And he went back to writing literature that was saturated by black music, more deeply involved in the culture, without regard to radical ideology.”

Although Hughes remembered Lawrence as the birth of his knowledge of racism, he returned to town in the 1960s — before his death of prostate cancer in 1967 in New York — to visit and lecture at KU.

“He had very strong associations with this community,” Jansen said.

In the past 20 years, Lawrence has named an elementary school after Hughes, inscribed City Hall with a line from Hughes’ poetry and staged conferences in his honor.

“I think he would be pleased that the community embraced him,” Jansen said. “To be honest, I don’t think that happened in his lifetime. But it has happened since his death.”

— The Associated Press contributed to this report.