Langston Hughes at Central High

Langston Hughes moved to Cleveland in nineteen sixteen at the age of fourteen, and arrived at Central High School to find something he had not expected: a school where Black and white students sat in the same classrooms, worked on the same publications, and ate in the same cafeteria. Hughes had grown up moving between a grandmother in Kansas, a mother in various cities, and a father he almost never saw. Central High was, by his later account, the least segregated institution he had encountered anywhere in America.

His teachers encouraged him. He began writing poetry and fiction for the school's literary magazine, The Monthly, which published his first poems. A teacher introduced him to the cadence of Carl Sandburg's free verse, which stayed in his work for the rest of his life. He counted several Jewish classmates among his friends.

He also found Karamu House, then called Playhouse Settlement, on the east side. Rowena and Russell Jelliffe ran it as a settlement house and theater. Hughes later wrote plays that premiered there, and he had already tried writing dramatic plays while still in high school. He graduated from Central High and left for New York and eventually Harlem, which is where America learned his name.

But the formation happened in Cleveland. The discipline, the ear for cadence, the friendship across racial lines, the discovery of theater: all of it came from four years on the east side of a Midwestern industrial city that did not know what it had.