On the train going across the Mississippi River, just outside St. Louis, I looked out the window and I saw this great muddy river flowing down toward the heart of the South. And I began to think about what this river had meant to the Negro people; how, in a sense, our history was linked to this river.

Celebrate the start of Black History Month and the birthday of Langston Hughes with a reading of his poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which was part of the Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to Langston Hughes event.