Word: langston
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Eight months into a public school-teaching career in Boston, Jonathan Kozol was fired in 1965 for reading an angry poem by Black Poet Langston Hughes to his class in the Roxbury ghetto. He detailed his frustrating experiences in Death at an Early Age, and set out to reform U.S. education by helping to found "free" schools: small private schools where parents are "free" to decide what their children should be taught. He concentrated first on Roxbury and later on such cities as New York, Chicago and St. Louis. His target was the ghetto, but the idea caught on with...
...trouble, however, with his "September Song." His jut-jawed, toothless version is obviously patterned after Walter Huston, but comes out sounding so much like Al Jolson that you expect him to genuflect and cry out "Mammy" at the end. Cohen and Lander do a witty, sultry, perfect interpretation of Langston Hughes's lyrics from Street Scene...
...wife Virginia, who is described by acquaintances as "a cheerleader type," began to turn down many invitations to parties and dinners and limited their social engagements to bridge games with close friends. "We were not used to being in the limelight," says Carswell's daughter, Mrs. Ramsay Langston, 24. "We wondered if it was ever going to be over...
...wrote in the Negro folk dialect of the rural South as well as standard English. The 1920s produced the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, when Negro poetry began to turn from the classic Eng lish lyric verse of Countee Cullen to the rhythmic, blues-style poetry of Langston Hughes. Later, came Pulitzer Prize-winning Gwendolyn Brooks, Jazz Poet Ted Joans and Margaret Walker, whom some call the mother of the black poets of the '60s. These new poets began to look on themselves not as Negro but as black. Writing primarily for a black audience, they turned their...
...humor or for the literary sense of irony that has dominated much of modern white poetry. But the black poets have a continuing oral tradition lacking in the more cerebral white English poetry. This tradition has been handed along from rural preachers to gospel singers to blues singers, to Langston Hughes, who dignified the street language of the blacks and read his poems wherever he could find an audience, even in bars. Today's black poets often chant their poetry in lofts, churches and schools, as if they were still tribal prophets. David Henderson's new book...