Student Told To Read Langston Hughes Poem “Blacker”

http://mybrownbaby.com/2012/03/student-told-to-read-langston-hughes-poem-blacker/

By Denene Millner

A Virginia high school English teacher is under fire for repeatedly singling out her sole African American student—most recently demanding that the 9^th grader read a poem by acclaimed African American poet Langston Hughes in a “blacker” style in front of his class.

Jordan Shumate, a student at George C. Marshall High School in Falls Church, Va., says he was reading Hughes’ “The Ballad of the Landlord,” a 1940 protest poem about a tenant thrown in jail for challenging his landlord, when his teacher, Marilyn Bart, interrupted him. “She told me, ‘Blacker, Jordan—c’mon, blacker. I thought you were black,’” Shumate told the Washington Post.

When the 14-year-old student refused to continue reading the poem, Bart showed him how it’s done. “She sounded like a maid in the 1960s,” said Shumate, whose story was corroborated by a fellow student. “She read the poem like a slave, basically.”