It was on this date, February 1, 1902, that American poet James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the son of a schoolteacher mother and a storekeeper father. As Hughes himself noted, “I grew up in a not very religious family, but I had a foster aunt who saw that I went to church and Sunday school.” Indeed, the influences evident in his work include the Bible as much as W.E.B. Du Bois, Walt Whitman and others…

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Originally published February 2004 by Ronald Bruce Meyer.