So the evening papers carried this item in the late editions:

DOUBLE LYNCHING IN GEORGIA

A large mob late this afternoon wrecked vengeance on the second of two Negro field hands, the murderers of Colonel Thomas Norwood, wealthy planter found dead at Big House Plantation. Bert Lewis was lynched last night, and his brother, Willie Lewis, today. The sheriff of the county is unable to identify any members of the mob. Colonel Norwood’s funeral has not yet been held. The dead man left no heirs.

BOOKS BY

LANGSTON HUGHES

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES

Spanning five decades and comprising 868 poems (nearly 300 of which have never before appeared in book form), this magnificent volume is the definitive sampling of a writer who has been called the poet laureate of African America—and perhaps our greatest popular poet since Walt Whitman. Here, for the first time, are all the poems that Langston Hughes published during his lifetime, arranged in the general order in which he wrote them and annotated by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. Alongside such famous works as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” The Collected Poems includes the author’s lesser-known verse for children; topical poems distributed through the Associated Negro Press; and poems such as “Goodbye Christ” that were once suppressed. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, the result is a treasure of a book, the essential collection of a poet whose words have entered our common language.

Poetry

THE PANTHER & THE LASH

From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was America’s acknowledged poet of color, the first to commemorate the experience—and suffering—of African-Americans in a voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. In this, his last collection of verse, Hughes’s voice is more pointed than ever before, as he explicitly addresses the racial politics of the sixties in such pieces as “Prime,” “Motto,” “Frederick Douglas: 1817–1895,” “Still Here,” “Birmingham Sunday,” “History,” “Slave,” “Warning,” and “Daybreak in Alabama.” Sometimes ironic, sometimes bitter, always powerful, the poems in The Panther and the Lash are the last testament of a great American writer who grappled fearlessly and artfully with the most compelling issues of his time.

Poetry

SELECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES

With the publication of his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926, Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in black writing in America. The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who “rushed the boots of Washington”; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in “the raffle of night.” They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out “wonder and pain and terror—and the marrow of the bone of life.” The poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death in 1967 and represent work from his entire career, including “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “The Weary Blues,” “Still Here,” “Song for a Dark Girl,” and “Refugee in America.” It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.

Poetry

THE WAYS OF WHITE FOLKS

In these acrid and poignant stories, Hughes depicted black people colliding—sometimes humorously, more often tragically—with whites in the 1920s and ’30s.

Short Stories