50 pages • 1 hour read
Lesa Cline-RansomeFinding Langston
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
How to use
The following materials bring books to life and support both individual and group literature study. Use these resources to draw real-world connections, plan interdisciplinary lessons, inspire unique research projects, create enrichment activities, and support differentiated instruction.
Books
This book for middle-grade and young-adult readers includes poetry, prose, paintings, photographs, newspaper “clippings,” playbills, and background information about the Harlem Renaissance.
This anthology of African American poetry includes works by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Countee Cullen, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Commentary explores the poets’ contributions to the African American cultural explosion of the early 20th century.
This book contains images from Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, a collection of 60 paintings that chronicle the mass exodus of African Americans from the rural South to the northern cities in the 1940s. The migration is mirrored in Finding Langston.
Videos
In this Kidlit TV interview with Lesa Cline-Ransome, she reveals her research methods and notes that stories of the Great Migration inspired her writing.
In this short video, teacher Rakia Hardaway traces the Harlem Renaissance from its roots in the Great Migration. Hardaway’s presentation includes slides about Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Armstrong, Jacob Lawrence, and other Harlem Renaissance artists.
This 1958 video from the National Endowment for the Arts features Langston Hughes reading “The Weary Blues” as the Doug Parker Band plays blues music, illustrating Henry’s remark in Finding Langston that Hughes’s poetry sounds “like the blues.”
Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee perform in this dramatization of Hughes’s poem “One-Way Ticket,” which expresses the bittersweet feeling of leaving the South in search of a better life.
Other Resources
This is a photograph of the George Cleveland Hall Branch, circa 1932. In Finding Langston, Langston observes that the ceiling inside the library “comes to a point like a hat.”
Another photograph of the George Cleveland Hall Branch
This website presents all 60 panels from Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, along with the captions he wrote for them.
This post from the University of Texas Harry Ransom Center provides a brief look into the makings of Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927), the poetry anthology Miss Fulton shares with Langston in Finding Langston.
