1 Walking with my brother along Seventh Avenue, I once saw a gathering around a brown-skinned man who was being interviewed by some white reporters. Mickey and I went over and found that the man was Langston Hughes. We listened to him talk. He sounded like any black man on the street. There was nothing extraordinary about him, nothing that lifted him out of the ordinary. His humor was gentle, thoughtful. I was disappointed. When I pictured the idea of “writer” in my mind, pictures from my school books came to mind, and Hughes did not fit that picture. What I didn’t admit was that neither did I. It would be years before I would meet Hughes again, and even longer before I would understand what we had in common, what we suffered in common. I didn’t tell him that I was a writer. I wish I had. 2 I also heard, for the first time, the poet Dylan Thomas on the radio. He read some of his poetry, including “In the White Giant’s Thigh,” and “It Was My Thirtieth Year to Heaven.” He was said to frequent The White Horse, a bar down on the West Side. I went down to the bar, wearing my blue sports jacket, which I thought made me look older.

3 …I wanted to do something wonderfully romantic, to fulfill my idea of what I thought a writer should be like. Dylan Thomas, with his high, ethereal voice and poetry that was, at times, incomprehensible, fulfilled that idea, whereas Hughes, writing about ordinary people and about a very mundane Harlem, did not fulfill that idea.

4 “What are you writing about?” a student asked me in Stuyvesant when I returned in September, full of hope and resolve. “What are you trying to do with your poems?”

5 What I was trying was not to do anything. What I was trying was to be somebody I could recognize as having the values and interests that I had learned were good. I wanted to be the person who wrote poems that moved the hearts of wicked men and made beautiful women swoon at my feet. I wanted to be the person who wrote with such a passion that all people would turn away from injustice and embrace the Sermon on the Mount.

The word prejudice is defined as “preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience.” If broken down by roots, pre means before and judge means form an opinion or conclusion. Which specific quote is the best example of prejudice in the selection. (AKS 1) (DOK3)

A.
“Walking with my brother along Seventh Avenue, I once saw a gathering around a brown-skinned man who was being interviewed by some white reporters.”

B.
“There was nothing extraordinary about him, nothing that lifted him out of the ordinary.”

C.
“When I pictured the idea of “writer” in my mind, pictures from my school books came to mind, and Hughes did not fit that picture.”

D.
“I went down to the bar, wearing my blue sports jacket, which I thought made me look older.”