The Connection

African-American lawyer, newspaperman (California Eagle), scholar, civil rights activist, and judge- Loren Miller led a career that successfully challenged discrimination in housing and thus aided in opening up the "greater community of Los Angeles.” His wife Juanita Miller worked as a caseworker to improve housing for the poor. The Millers were very dear, longtime friends of Langston Hughes. Loren served as Hughes’ first literary agent. Juanita helped Langston present one of his early plays by creating a theatre on the famed Central Avenue in Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter, Juanita and her friend Dorothy Vena Johnson founded The League of Allied Arts in 1939. Many of the Miller-Hughes papers are archived at The Huntington Library, in San Marino, CA.

Background on Langston

Born February 2, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes is one of the most revolutionary thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance and indeed American poetry. He grew up in his grandmother's home in Lawrence, Kansas. During his life, Hughes would travel from Kansas to Illinois to Cleveland, Ohio where, he attended Cleveland High School before moving to Mexico with his father. Thereafter, he moved to New York to study literature at Columbia University, to the dismay of his father.

College was not what Hughes expected it to be and found himself in Paris, France writing poetry and waiting tables. Hughes' life was primarily migratory but he found a home in Harlem. His first exposure in the literary world came through his contributions to magazines such as The Crisis, The Worker's Monthly, Vanity Fair and Opportunity. Loren Miller, an attorney and his friend in Los Angeles, served as his first literary agent.

In 1925, his collection The Weary Blues made a lasting impression on the literary world. More than simply serving as the title to his first book of poems, the title conveyed the idea that black America embodied such a weariness as is only characterized by the blues. Further, the fact that these blues could be called a "Sweet Blues!" forged a narrative of persistence amid adversity that characterized the history of blacks in America.

Initially, Hughes’ poetry was seen as embodying everything the wealthy black community of the time did not want to express to America about African-Americans. His poetry reflected a certain black cultural experience which black bourgeois intellectuals believed glorified inappropriate and unrepresentative lifestyles they found unacceptable. Rather than accepting the idea that the black American was uncultured, Hughes used the very elements American society pointed out as beautiful and revealed their beauty.

In 1938, Hughes came to Los Angeles and successfully presented his play- Don’t I Wanna Be Free, in a small theatre on Central Ave., thanks to his friends Mrs. Loren (Juanita) Miller and Dorothy Vena Johnson.

Through infusing his art with the language and structural forms common to blues and jazz music, Hughes uncovered the inherent poetry in the rhythms of this human experience.