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Langston Hughes on Trial

01/06/20 | 4m 39s | Rating: TV-PG

In 1953, the author Langston Hughes was called before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations to answer questions about Communist influences in his writing. The private, closed-door interrogation pitted Hughes against the Subcommittee’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn. We dramatized the actual hearing transcripts of Hughes’s testimony, made public 50 years later.

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Corporate sponsorship for American Experience is provided by Liberty Mutual Insurance and Carlisle Companies. Major funding by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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