“His was the fight of the black man in America seeking to be offered, in simplest terms, the elusive fair consideration for available opportunities. He asked for and expected what his talent and his citizenship had led him to believe he deserved: the right to compete, not with special privilege or preference, but on a level playing field where everybody else scrambled to display their gifts, their reasons, their dreams. … He had remarkable eyes, of the sort that made James Baldwin a compelling, beautiful human being, and Hugh’s colour, the most warm and urgently engaging brown imaginable, was anchored by a smile that didn’t so much glitter or shine as it brought a gentle, memorable light.
“To have known him, as a worker in the arts and as a neighbour in New York’s fabled Greenwich Village, will be to miss Hugh a great deal. He could talk you into a daze, on a street corner, in the lobby of your apartment building or his, below a marquee or outside a coffee shop. Hugh never met the conversation he didn’t like or was willing to end. He was the Harlem kid who wanted a world as old as human communication, a place where Shakespeare had been comfortable, and Olivier, Poitier, and Eugene O’Neill, too.”
–Clayton Riley, The Guardian, July 25, 1995
Photo: Hugh Hurd in “Shadows”