A few days after poet Amiri Baraka died, Maya Angelou shared the humorous story behind a famous photo of the two friends dancing.
According to her telling, they were attending a tribute to the late Langston Hughes in 1991 when photographer Chester Higgins, Jr. snapped the image. The caption, published in the New York Times, described Angelou and Baraka as performing an "African Custom of ancestral return." But, as Angelou explains below, that wasn't exactly how they remembered it.
Amiri Baraka was already the people’s poet when he answered to the name LeRoi Jones. We had a very famous photograph taken in 1991 by Chester Higgins, Jr. The photograph appeared in the New York Times. At the time the legend under said in effect, two of America’s great poets dancing a traditional African rite dance over the remains of Langston Hughes at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black C...
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