Langston Hughes: This is why the poet who wrote I Dream A World has been given a Google doodle

Google has marked what would have been the 113th birthday of pioneering African-American jazz poet and social activist, Langston Hughes with a Doodle on its homepage.

The animated sequence shows a caricature of Hughes at his typewriter as lines from his poem I Dream a World appear.

Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and largely raised by his grandmother while his mother looked for work. His father - with whom he had troubled relationship - had left the family and travelled to Cuba and Mexico in an attempt to escape the racism that was rife in America at the time. Hughes joined his father in Mexico and agreed to study engineering so long as he could attend Colombia University. He left the following year due to racial prejudice.

He travelled to West Africa and Europe, before returning to the US taking various jobs before meeting the poet Vachel Lindsay while working as a busboy at a Washington hotel. Lindsay was impressed with Hughes' work and became his patron.

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