Labor Collections at Harvard

The labor archives pamphlets and ephemera contain remarkable surprises.  One of the organizations included is the International Workers Order, which sponsored a series of theatrical performances over a span of years. Among the holdings are sheet music and play scripts, including the only known extant copy of Langston Hughes’ music-play, “The Sun Do Move.” The play was included in print for the first time in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 5, (2001), using the script from the Slichter Collection.

In an interesting side note, the papers of Langston Hughes held in the Beinecke Library at Yale do contain a copy of the play, but it is a photocopy of the Littauer script, according to Leslie Sanders, the editor of the Collected Works, Vol. 5. Were a donor to provide money for the reformatting of this material, the entirety of the pamphlet collection could be properly processed. It is intriguing to consider the possibility of what else might come to light.