Word: langston
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...YEARS AGO, Jonathan Kozol '58, Harvard Graduate and Rhodes Scholar, got a job teaching black fourth graders in the then segregated Boston public school system and was fired for having his class read a poem by Langston Hughes. The poem, he was informed, was not on the approved reading list, and the school department was not of a mind to allow teachers to determine what was to pass for education...
...With apologies to Langston Hughes...
...LANGSTON HUGHES created Jess B. Simple in his newspaper column in the Chicago Defender in the 1940's. Posing behind a mantle of slow-witted stubbornness. Simple talks his way through barrooms and street corners, can of beer in hand, fashioning a glittering slice of Harlem life with his words. Hughes was fascinated with Harlem, and in Simple's tales he highlights his dreamy view of Harlem, a city-within-a-city where black culture reigns and black people share their trouble with laughter. Fiercely proud of blackness, Simple mixes an innocent wonder at the strange cruelty of the segregated...
...impossible to live in Harlem and not know at least a hundred Simples, fifty Joyces, twenty-five Zaritas, a number of Boyds, and several cousin Minnies or reasonable facsimilies thereof." Langston Hughes writes in his introduction to another collection of Simple stories, Simple's Harlem is a glimpse of the people who produced Simple; from Hughes's tales of one man's life and friends. Cross and Kirkland have created an entire world of classic characters...
Admissions officials explained that the first reader of each file classifies the applicant as either white, black, Oriental, Indian or Latin on the basis of a student's participation in a scholarship program for minorities, the kinds of books he reads (i.e., Langston Hughes is a giveaway) and his high school background. Jewett said that sometimes the interviewer uses phrases like "Despite his being a minority student...