Juke Box Love Song
Langston 
Photo by Gordon Parks
Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967)
Cross
My old man’s a white old man
And my old mother’s black.
If ever I cursed my white old man
I take my curses back.
If ever I cursed my black old mother
And wished she were in hell,
I’m sorry for that evil wish
And now I wish her well
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder were I’m going to die,
Being neither white nor black?
In The Big Sea Hughes reported that his “Weary Blues,” which won him his first poetry prize, “included the first blues [he’s] ever heard way back in Lawrence, Kansas, when [he] was a kid.”
Watch the Weary Blues (youtube)
See photos by Roy DeCarava
DE CARAVA, Roy, and HUGHES, Langston, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, Washington, Howard University Press, 1984.
DeCarava 
Hallway
Roy de Carava
DeCarava’s photographs languished in a closet until he took them to Langston Hughes. “I thought Hughes would enjoy them because they were so much about people,” DeCarava told In These Times this February. “He was very touched and moved by the pictures and said, ‘Let me try to get them published.’”
Hughes found Simon and Schuster willing to bring out the book, but only on the condition that Hughes write an accompanying text. DeCarava at that point relinquished control of the project, giving Hughes some 500 photographs from which to make a selection. Of the people he had photographed, DeCarava told Hughes nothing.
The Sweet Flypaper of Life is not, then, a collaboration of writer and photographer, but a writer’s response to photographs
(via)
Read Juke Box Love Song
I could take the Harlem night
and wrap around you
-Langston Hughes
History
The past has been a mint
Of blood and sorrow.
That must not be
True of tomorrow
More Langston’s political poems here
Roy DeCarava R.I.P (previous post here).
Something unrelated:
Two new art photos by Chagoya 
were added to my previous post “American Psycho”.