the last book I ever read (The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes, excerpt six)

from The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes:

Like the bullfights, I can never put on paper the thrill of that underground ride to Harlem. I had never been in a subway before and it fascinated me—the noise, the speed, the green lights ahead. At every station I kept watching for the sign: 135TH STREET. When I saw it, I held my breath. I came out onto the platform with two heavy bags and looked around. It was still early morning and people were going to work. Hundreds of colored people! I wanted to shake hands with them, speak to them. I hadn’t seen any colored people for so long—that is, any Negro colored people.

I went up the steps and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again. I registered at the Y.

the last book I ever read (The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes, excerpt five)

from The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes:

My mother let me go to the station alone, and I felt pretty bad when I got on the train. I felt bad for the next three or four years, to tell the truth, and those were the years when I wrote most of my poetry. (For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn’t write anything.)

the last book I ever read (The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes, excerpt four)

from The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes:

That November the First World War ended. In Cleveland, everybody poured into the streets to celebrate the Armistice. Negroes, too, although Negroes were increasingly beginning to wonder where, for them, was that democracy they had fought to preserve. In Cleveland, a liberal city, the color line began to be drawn tighter and tighter. Theaters and restaurants in the downtown area began to refuse to accommodate colored people. Landlords doubled and tripled the rents at the approach of a dark tenant. And when the white soldiers came back from the war, Negroes were often discharged from their jobs and white men hired in their places.

the last book I ever read (The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes, excerpt three)

from The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes:

I was reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and Edna Ferber and Dreiser, and de Maupassant in French. I never will forget the thrill of first understanding the French of de Maupassant. The soft snow was falling through one of his stories in the little book we used in school, and that I had worked over so long, before I really felt the snow falling there. Then all of a sudden one night the beauty and the meaning of the words in which he made the snow fall, came to me. I think it was de Maupassant who made me really want to be a writer and write stories about Negroes, so true that people in far-away lands would read them—even after I was dead.

But I did not dare write stories yet, although poems came to me now spontaneously, from somewhere inside. But there were no stories in my mind. I put the poems down quickly on anything I had at hand when they came into my head, and later I copied them in a notebook. But I began to be afraid to show my poems to anybody, because they had become very serious and very much a part of me. And I was afraid other people might not like them or understand them.

the last book I ever read (The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes, excerpt two)

from The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes:

I was the Class Poet. It happened like this. They had elected all the class officers, but there was no one in our class who looked like a poet, or had ever written a poem. There were two Negro children in the class, myself and a girl. In America most white people think, of course, that all Negroes can sing and dance, and have a sense of rhythm. So my classmates, knowing that a poem had to have rhythm, elected me unanimously—thinking, no doubt, that I had some, being a Negro.

The day I was elected, I went home and wondered what I should write. Since we had eight teachers in our school, I thought there should be one verse for each teacher, with an especially good one for my favorite teacher, Miss Ethel Welsh. And since the teachers were to have eight verses, I felt the class should have eight, too. So my first poem was about the longest poem I ever wrote—sixteen verses, which were later cut down. In the first half of the poem, I said that our school had the finest teacher there ever were. And in the latter half, I said our class was the greatest class ever graduated. So at graduation, when I read the poem, naturally everybody applauded loudly.

That was the way I began to write poetry.

the last book I ever read (The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes, excerpt one)

from The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes:

I am brown. My father was a darker brown. My mother an olive-yellow. On my father’s side, the white blood in his family came from a Jewish slave trader in Kentucky, Silas Cushenberry, of Clark County, who was his mother’s father; and Sam Clay, a distiller of Scotch descent, living in Henry County, who was his father’s father. So on my father’s side both male great-grandparents were white, and Sam Clay was said to be a relative of the great statesman, Henry Clay, his contemporary.

On my mother’s side, I had a paternal great-grandfather named Quarles—Captain Ralph Quarles—who was white and who lived in Louisa County, Virginia, before the Civil War, and who had several colored children by a colored housekeeper, who was his slave. The Quarles traced their ancestry back to Francis Quarles, famous Jacobean poet, who wrote A Feast for Worms.

the last book I ever read (The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan, excerpt eleven)

from The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan by Laurence Leamer:

The UKA was full of know-nothing, low-life types who cared little about the philosophy that Shelton espoused. He didn’t like spending much time with them, for they compromised his vision. Now that he had no more contact with Wallace, he needed new excitements, new possibilities for action, and sophisticated new contacts. In 1972 an informant told the FBI that Shelton had met with Dr. Sallah El Dareer, an Arab-American leader in Birmingham, who wanted Shelton to help establish a camp to train anti-Israel insurgents. El Dareer told the informant “due to a lack of funds and his inability to satisfy the KKK’s material demands, he had not been able to start the training camp.”

Another informant told the FBI that Shelton confided to an associate that he planned to turn the UKA into an “out-in-the-open paramilitary organization and would, if necessary, be patterned after the German Gestapo.” He met with a group of Arab-American activists and told them that American Jews needed to have “fear put in them by the killing of a few Jewish leaders.” The Klan leader agreed to show an anti-Israel film at a Klan meeting and “distribute any available Arab literature.”