Cleveland's Karamu House theater receives a grant to restore Langston Hughes' residence in Cleveland for aspiring artists of color....Hughes was a famous poet, playwright, novelist, and social activist....Cleveland's Karamu House is the oldest African-American theater in the U.S.

 

Pictured is the late poet and playwright Langston Hughes, also a social activist, Black columnist, avid story teller, and famed Black novelist who wrote fiction books

The Karamu House theater in Cleveland, Ohio, the oldest African-American theater in the United States

CLEVELAND, Ohio- Karamu House in Cleveland will receive a $75,000 grant from the African-American Cultural House fund to restore the apartment residence in Cleveland of the late poet and playwright Langston Hughes, who was also a social activist, a Black columnist, an avid story teller and $75a famed novelist who wrote fiction books.

The $75,000 grant is part of a $3 million grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to help restore African-American landmarks and will be used  to restore Hughes' former apartment residence for use as short-term housing for emerging artists of color to reside to study art-in-residence,  Karamu officials said. 

Though Hughes grew up in a series of mid-western towns and was raised primarily in Kansas by his maternal grandmother, he lived in Cleveland briefly with his family and graduated from the now defunct Central High School Cleveland in the city's Fairfax neighborhood. He went on to eventually earn a bachelor's degree from Lincoln University, after previously dropping out of Columbia University.

Many of Langston Hughes's plays were developed and premièred at  Karamu House, a theater in the Fairfax neighborhood on the  largely Black east side of Cleveland that first opened in 1915 and the oldest African-American theater in the United States.

Best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes published several non-fiction works, and from 1942 to 1962, as the civil rights movement was gaining traction, he wrote an in-depth weekly column in a leading black newspaper, The Chicago Defender. His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. 

He received numerous awards for his work, including the Sringarn Medal, the Ansfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, and the Quill Award for Poetry 

Hughes never married and died in 1967 at the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City at the age of 66 from complications after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer. His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University holds the Langston Hughes papers (1862–1980) and the Langston Hughes collection (1924–1969) containing letters, manuscripts, personal items, photographs, clippings, artworks, and objects that document the life of Hughes.

The Langston Hughes Memorial Library on the campus of Lincoln University, as well as at the James Weldon Johnson Collection within the Yale University also hold archives of Hughes' work. And the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University includes materials acquired from his travels and contacts through the work of  Dorothy B. Porter.

Direct references by Wikipedia.com

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