This Day in History poem by Langston Hughes

Birthday's:
John Napier, Scottish mathematician/ inventor (logarithms), 1550 Edinburgh, Scotland.
1895: American director (Stagecoach, Air Mail, Quiet Man) John Ford, Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
1901: American actor Clark Gable
1902: American writer Langston Hughes
1918: Muriel Spark, Scottish writer (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) born Edinburgh Scotland.


1790: The first session of the Supreme Court of the United States was held, in New York City.
1820: In a battle fought in Cepeda, Argentina, federalist forces defeated unitarios, who were advocates of strong central government.
1884: The first ten volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary was published in London, the final volume being published in April 19, 1928.
1896: Giacomo Puccini premiered his opera La Boheme at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy.
1923: The private army of Blackshirts that had helped Benito Mussolini come to power in Italy was officially transformed into a national militia, the Voluntary Fascist Militia for National Security.
1960: Protesting a segregated lunch counter at a Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, four African Americans began a sit-in; its success led to a wider sit-in movement throughout the South.
1979: The spacecraft Voyager 1 photographed Jupiter form a distance of 32.7 million km (20.3 million miles).
2003:  Space shuttle Columbia was destroyed while returning to Earth.

Blues in Stereo

By: Langston Hughes

Your number’s coming out!
Bouquets I’ll send you
And dreams I’ll send you
And horses shod with gold
On which to ride if motor cars
Would be too tame-
Triumphal entry send you-
Shouts from the Earth itself
Bare feet to beat the great drum beat
Of glory to your name and mine-
One and the same:
You barefoot, too,
In the quarter of the Negroes
Where an ancient river flows
Past huts that house a million blacks
And the white god never goes
For the moon would white his
Whiteness
Beyond its mask of whiteness
And the night might be astonished
And so lose its repose.

In a town named after Stanley
Night each night comes nightly
And the music of music’s
Borrowed for the horns
That don’t know how to play
On LPs that wonder
How they ever got that way.

What time is it, mama?
What time is it now?
Makes no difference to me-
But I’m asking, anyhow. 
What time is it, mama?
What time now?

Down the long hard ro that I been
Hoeing
I thought I hear the horn of plenty
Blowing
But I got to get a new antenna, Lord-
My TV keeps on snowing.