Urban Poets in Country Schools

Abstract

This chapter follows Langston Hughes’s travels in rural America in the 1920s, and the circulation of, and commentary on, his poems in well-known and relatively obscure rural publications, including Tuskegee’s Messenger and Hampton’s Southern Workman. It uses the journal of a Black Catholic agricultural and industrial high school in rural Maryland—the Cardinal’s Notebook, co-edited by Tuskegee alumna Constance Daniel—as a case study to explore how Hughes’s thematically urban poems were recast in important ways by the editorial practices of rural publishers. It argues that rural journals are key sites of rural–urban creative exchange during the Harlem Renaissance; while many African Americans are moving out of the rural South, poetry by urban Black authors is migrating in, and sometimes being inflected and transformed by those new print contexts.