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Langston Hughes and Richard Wright Langston Hughes helped advance black literature in the United States more than any other writer. As a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, Hughes also wrote fiction, plays, and a newspaper column-anything that would express the status of blacks in American society. His story “Cross” describes a person that is a son to a white father and a black mother. He compares the two in ways that put the white male above the black mother drastically. He says, “If ever I cursed my white old man, I take the curses back. If ever I cursed my black old mother and wished she were in hell, I’m sorry for that evil wish and now I wish her well.” To me this means that discipline was coming to the son if he did not repent of cursing his old man. Yet if he was to do it to his mother, the only bad thing that would happen