The Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute invites you to a lecture by Dr. Darryl Dickson-Carr, E.A. Lilly Professor of English at SMU, marking the 125th anniversary of the birth of Langston Hughes. This is the first event in the 2026 Godbey Anniversary Lecture Series. 

On June 23, 1926, poet Langston Hughes published "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" in The Nation magazine as a riposte to Black artists and intellectuals reluctant to embrace and celebrate Black culture after centuries of opposition and neglect. Hughes, then but 25 years old, had already earned a reputation as his generation's most promising young poet. Soon to be the first Black writer to earn a living solely through writing and speaking, Hughes declares in his landmark essay that "[w]e younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too."

In the 125 years since his birth in Joplin, Missouri, and in the nearly 60 years since his passing, Langston Hughes's reputation as one of the United States and the world's great poets has only grown. Hughes helped bring into the mainstream Black folk culture, from the blues and jazz to tricksters, dancing, and rich stories. Although he enjoyed a long, rich career, it was during the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance that he wrote many of the poems that we read and discuss to this day. A close friend of Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas, Rudolph Fisher, Dorothy West, Louise Thompson, and many other young artists, Hughes was one of the movement's central players, one who discovered and nurtured the next generation of artists. Without Hughes, American popular culture wouldn't be the same. 

This Godbey Lecture explores Langston Hughes's influence on American culture and celebrates his legacy alongside the Harlem Renaissance's centennial.

Darryl Dickson-Carr is E.A. Lilly Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he teaches courses in twentieth-century American literature, African American literature, and satire. He is the author of Spoofing the Modern: Satire in the Harlem Renaissance (U of South Carolina P, 2015), The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2005), and African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (University of Missouri Press, 2001). He has served as guest editor for issues of ADE-ADFL Bulletin, Studies in American Humor, and Public Humanities. His current research focuses on African American political rhetoric.