20 East 127 Street, Langston Hughes’ house, 1940. Tax Photograph collection, NYC Municipal Archives.
Continuing our celebration of WNYC’s 100th Anniversary and in honor of Black History Month, we present this 1957 recording of Langston Hughes discussing the challenges faced by Black writers from a National Association of Authors panel discussion “The Writer’s Position in America.” The themes he discusses: representation, pigeonholing and lack of intellectual freedom, seem as salient today as they were in 1957.
Langston Hughes was an icon of the Harlem Renaissance, and although best known as a poet and novelist, was also a journalist, a composer and an activist. He was a frequent guest on WNYC radio.
On July 8, 1924, radio station WNYC made its inaugural broadcast from a studio at the top of the Municipal Building. During 2024, For the Record will celebrate the centennial of one of the nation’s first municipally-owned radio station with a series of articles featuring historical audio recordings from the WNYC collection in the Municipal Archives.
In 1986 the Municipal Archives acquired a large collection of original WNYC lacquer phono discs and tapes dating back to 1937. These unique audio recordings capture the sounds of a city and a nation through decades of transformations, tribulations, and triumphs in the voices of presidents, dignitaries, world leaders, artistic revolutionaries, musical geniuses, luminaries of the literati, and cultural icons. Outside of the federal government, the WNYC Collection is the largest non-commercial collection of archival audio recordings and ephemera from an individual radio broadcaster.
The Archives has collaborated with WNYC on a series of projects to reformat this material. Most recently, funding from the Leon Levy Foundation enabled digitization of thousands of hours of audio content that documented political, historical, scientific, and cultural events—both large and small.