he heard around him. He continued to write and publish in The Crisis. He met poet Vachel Lindsay, who liked his poems and promoted them. In 1926 Hughes published his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, about Harlem life.Hughes continued writing through the 1930s and the 1940s, speaking for the poor and homeless black people who suffered during the Great Depression. He wrote of their daily lives in America's cities, of their anger and their loves. Black people loved reading his works and hearing him read his poems at public presentations all over the country. To them he was "Harlem's Poet." When Hughes died in 1967, a jazz band played at his funeral.The Harlem that Hughes loved and where he lived most of his life was an exciting place. This newly developed suburb of New York City was planned, laid out, and built almost too fast; the bottom dropped out of the real estate market in 1904-1905. Harlem had broad boulevards, beautiful town houses, and exclusive apartment buildingsbut no residents. Desperate to rent to anyone, many developers began to open Harlem to blacks, and by 1914 Harlem was a black city. Its population almost exploded during the years of the First World War as blacks from the South moved north in search of better jobs and fuller citizenship--the beginning of what came to be known as the Great Migration. At the same time, because it was a port city, New York attracted a large influx of blacks from the West Indies and even Africa. Meanwhile blacks enlisted in the armed forces in record numbers and distinguished themselves on the battlefield in Europe. They also took the sounds of ragtime and jazz to England and France, and caused a sensation.After the war the combination of the Great Migration, the mix of cultures in Harlem, and a newfound sense of black unity and confidence produced a great burst of creativity. The black writer, educator, and intellectual Alain Locke described a new sense of Negro identity: "Here in Man...
