Nina Simone, Langston Hughes and the birth of Black Power

By Tom Whitfield

In 1949, Langston Hughes met 16-year-old Eunice Waymon, later Nina Simone, at a lecture in Asheville, North Carolina. W Jason Miller dates their first meeting to the year Hughes began touring the country to read poems and draw full auditoriums.

Miller sees more than a literary friendship. “Nina Simone refined the strategies of resistance Langston Hughes pioneered during the Harlem Renaissance to create the soundtrack to the civil rights movement and inaugurate the birth of Black Power,” he writes in his new book, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power.

What does this change for the history of Black Power?

The book draws on first-hand accounts and archives. It argues that both artists deserve more credit for their role in the Black Power movement, rather than viewing that movement mainly through nonviolence. It links their collaboration to Black Power’s emergence.

“Backlash Blues” influenced Kwame Ture, the activist and Black revolutionary then known as Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the phrase “Black power”.

Miller places Hughes among the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, but not only in that period. The poet died in May 1967, less than 11 months before Dr King’s assassination. Miller says Hughes remained active, involved and productive until his death.

The book’s argument depends on mentorship rather than coincidence. Simone and Hughes moved in the same direction. Hughes had wanted a hit since 1949 and wanted Simone to sing his work. His last poem sent for publication became “Backlash Blues”, the song he gave Simone to sing.

At the 1960 Newport jazz festival, Simone watched from the third row while Hughes led a two-and-a-half-hour blues session, directing Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. Miller says she recognized a music lover she could trust, not only an icon.

Miller also treats Simone’s politics as broader than nonviolence. He places her closer to Kwame Ture than to Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, and describes her as a fiery figure whom audiences could overlook. Their ability together, he argues, produced the civil rights movement’s soundtrack.

She brought Hughes’s methods into music by updating older material. In academic terms, Miller calls the method signifying; to a high school teacher it looks like allusion, and to a modern listener it resembles sampling.

In “Tomorrow Is My Turn”, she turned a love song into a statement that tomorrow would bring a chance. In “Go to Hell”, she added a last verse that said they were in hell.

“Sinner Man” carried the technique into religion and politics. Simone learned music in church in western North Carolina and had heard and performed the song. At Hughes’s prompting, she recorded it in late 1965.

Miller reads it as more than a biblical judgment: it addresses student ambassadors fighting for change, white Klan members and prayer’s role in the civil rights movement.

She also thought of Jimmy Lee Jackson while working on “Sinner Man”, connecting the song’s characters to what began the march from Selma to Montgomery, Miller says.

Simone grew up in Tryon and studied in Asheville with the goal of becoming a classical pianist. Hazel Scott was her icon, and Bach her favorite musician of all time. Miller compares her fusion of popular and classical music with the efforts of Leonard Bernstein and Walt Disney to bring classical music to a wider audience.

In “Love Me or Leave Me” and other pieces, she interpolated Bach inside popular songs. Late in her career, listeners hearing a vinyl record or seeing her in concert encountered classical music within popular forms, whether they recognized it or not.

At her first Carnegie Hall concert, her manager husband, Andy Stroud, put up a great deal of money and hired a big promoter. They worried they could not sell out. The first half offered classical instrumental music, not her singing. Hughes wrote promotional blurbs for posters and newspaper ads.

Their upbringing also shaped their public reputations. Hughes’s grandmother spent time with the Lumbee people in North Carolina. Before he met Simone, he told a newspaper interviewer that his grandmother was part Lumbee and part of the North Carolina tradition. Hughes’s leftist politics drew condemnation, as did Simone’s.

A mentorship built on trust

Miller calls the book a biography of their friendship, including its mentoring and collaboration. Hughes’s circle included Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker and Amiri Baraka. Miller also met Mary “Pee Wee” Lindsay in Oxford, North Carolina. In the early 1950s, she recalled approaching Hughes with a couple of pages of poems.

He spent 30 minutes going through them, despite what Miller calls her lack of international-level talent. She never published a book.

For six years, Miller tracked their letters and every instance of their being together. He found only one sentence mentioning Simone in seven biographies of Hughes. He also located one of Simone’s former roommates. At 91, she remembered Hughes visiting their high school and first meeting Simone.

At a Raleigh book event, Miller told the audience that Hughes had been asked to write liner notes for a singer’s album. The poet’s answer, Miller recalled, was: “Why, Nina, I’d be happy to.” The audience gasped.

After Hughes’s death in 1967, Simone had “Backlash Blues” ready but had neither recorded nor released it. She then wrote a new verse that included their relationship.

Miller says the loss taught her how to incorporate major figures into music and art. In 1969, two years after Hughes’s death and one year after Dr King’s assassination, she composed “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”.

He sees it, with “Why the King of Love Is Dead”, as part of her sustained effort to make political music.

The book changes the historical frame: future accounts of Black Power now have a documented partnership to test, alongside Miller’s claim that both artists deserve more credit than they have received.