Justin Taylor recommends we read the short stories of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

“If racism and race-based slavery was America’s original sin,” Taylor says, “Hughes demonstrates that racism and the legacy of slavery were alive and killing us in the middle of the last century.”

But for a winter of heartache, we can still see a spring of hope.

“For Hughes, humanity—sheer cussed humanness—is always breaking out and defying the lies of the racialist.”