“Let America Be America Again” resonates ... Finish story here; 10 Langston Hughes Poems That Define the American Spirit.

After a half-century of secrecy, author Langston ... Hughes told of his Lawrence childhood and how the discrimination here began to shape his work, political views and perceptions of America.

In 1965, he was discharged from a ghetto school in Boston, in part because he read Langston Hughes’ poem “Ballad of the Landlord” to his class: Landlord, landlord, My roof has sprung a leak.