In 1949, the poet and writer Langston Hughes was already a towering figure – he toured the country reading his poems and lecturing, drawing crowds that filled auditoriums. That year, at a lecture in Asheville, North Carolina, Hughes met a 16-year-old girl, Eunice Waymon, who would go on to make history in her own right using her stage name, Nina Simone.
Hughes and Simone became friends and collaborators, working together on songs such as Backlash Blues, which soundtracked what was then a nascent Black Power movement. The song influenced Kwame Ture, the activist and Black revolutionary who was then known as Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the phrase “Black power”.
