Langston Hughes

"By what sends the white kids I ain't sent: I know I can't be President." -- from "Montage of a Dream Deferred" by Langston Hughes (1951).In the brief decade or two of my adulthood, blacks have made three great tries for the U.S. presidency and they've lost each time.First, there was Brooklyn, N.Y., congresswoman Shirley Chisholm's campaign during the Democratic primary in 1972. Then, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson tried twice -- in the Democratic primaries of 1984 and 1988.Of course, there have been other black presidential wannabes as well, although their campaigns existed so far outside the mainstream that their candidacies were all but invisible.

BOSTON -- My love of ''Black Nativity'' comes from more than being a stage dad for my two participating sons. The easy reason is that this stage version of Jesus' birth, currently running at Tremont Temple in Boston, is plain good. It has run here for 27 years. When it made its debut 35 years ago on Broadway, critics hailed it for its ''wild, pounding rapture'' and its ''uninhibited spirits and unlimited lung power.''The main reason is that ''Black Nativity'' itself is a miracle. It was written by Langston Hughes, a great poet who had little or no faith in traditional religion.

T he poet Langston Hughes called Harlem the "Negro Capital of the World," and in the 1950s, when I was growing up there, it really was. The great northern migration of Southern blacks that began near the turn of the last century had made Harlem the largest African-American community in the country, and people still looked back with pride to the remarkable flowering of black arts and culture of the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance. So I was somewhat nonplused by a recent report that African-Americans no longer constitute a majority in Harlem.

But if you was to ask me How de blues they come to be, Says if you was to ask me How de blues they come to be - You wouldn't need to ask me: Just look at me and see! - Langston Hughes It's the funkiness of life electrified in the notes on a guitar. It's the weariness of the daily grind distilled in the ache of a human voice. Over the years, some have embellished the blues with different flavors - horns, strings and things. But you really don't need all of that to feel the blues. The nuances are complex, but what resonates at the core is straight-up and real - a penetration into the soul, a cracked mirror held up to reality.

In the 1920s, Harlem on New York's Upper West Side was the "Negro Capital of the World." The migration of hundreds of thousands of Southern rural blacks to Northern cities in the first decades of the century had made Harlem the largest black community in the nation.In the Roaring '20s it was the scene of an incredible outpouring of artistic, literary and musical creativity that would be remembered as the Harlem Renaissance.Black writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston and Countee Cullen produced plays, poems and novels celebrating the "New Negro" who was emerging in the city - urbane, politically aware and relentlessly modern.

A 32-year-old woman was wounded in the leg during a drive-by shooting in Northwest Baltimore on Tuesday night, according to city police. Police responded to the 4900 block of Nelson Avenue in the city's Langston Hughes neighborhood, near Langston Hughes Elementary School, about 8:24 p.m. and found the woman with a gunshot wound to the leg, police said. The woman had been seated in a vehicle when another vehicle carrying two men pulled up, one of them shot her and then the vehicle drove off, police said.

Vinnette Carroll, 80, a director, actress and playwright who created the 1976 Broadway musical Your Arms Too Short to Box With God, died Tuesday in Lauderhill, Fla., of complications from diabetes and heart disease. Ms. Carroll, a longtime resident of New York City, specialized in productions by black writers and composers. In 1972, she became the first black woman to direct on Broadway -- a musical revue called Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope at the Playhouse Theatre. Ms. Carroll also was the first black woman to bring gospel music to Broadway -- a 1969 adaptation of Langston Hughes' poetry that became Trumpets of the Lord.

Hometown -- Silver Spring Current members --Joe Ryan, vocals, guitar; Jim Glass, vocals, guitar; Kari Cohen, bass; Sammy "The Kid" Ponzar, drums Founded in --2005 Style --indie rock Influenced by --the Beatles, Guided by Voices, Thomas Dolby, Dylan Thomas, Langston Hughes, the Oranges Band Notable --The band is working on its first full-length album at Roman Kuebler's Baltimore studio. Kuebler, the front man for the Oranges Band, is recording Impossible Hair on analog tape and has been a guiding influence for the band.

Stephanie Jordan, a jazz singer who has studied classical ballet and African and modern dance, won the 1994 Billie Holiday Vocal Competition at the Walters Art Gallery yesterday.June Page, who has worked as a teacher and flight attendant, placed second.Robin Rouse, a musical theater and variety show performer, took third among a field of 14 semifinalists.Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke launched the competition five years ago on the 75th anniversary of the legendary jazz singer's birth. Clair Zamoiski List, director of the Mayor's Advisory Committee on Art and Culture, said the objective is to commemorate Ms. Holiday's contribution to music and to recognize and support emerging artists from Baltimore and Baltimore County.

The National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition, “Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets,” uses portraiture, biography and verse to explore the people who created a distinctive, American voice. Walt Whitman's free verse in "Leaves of Grass," (1855), was a shocking departure from literary tradition, the museum notes -- both for its form and for the inclusion of topics that described ordinary life. (That mirrors the equally shocking mid-century shift to realism by painters such as Courbet in France.)