it's called zorro returns to harlem and the main character in the show was a good friend of langston hughes. in doing her research she told me one thing. she said anthony you are writing hip-hop literature which is great but she said did you know that langston hughes did jazz portrait? that was news to me so i researched it and i realized that the renaissance was big at the time and langston hughes was doing his thing here. hip-hop music is big now that i'm doing my thing here so they're some kind of correlation between his work and my work historically speaking and he used the music of the time, the rhythm to forbear his word, to be the backdrop of the rhythm of his lines of his poetry. in saying that my dialogs are hip-hop and meaning the iconic expression of is what i use for my character. you will here i am saying and it's colloquial but it's communicative and it's young and it's fresh. a lot of kids get into it whereas the parents want to give so there is a correlation between jazz poetry and hip-hop literature, the rhythm. >> i want to say on that for second anthony because when you t

i memorized james weldon johnson, paul laurence dunbar, countee cullen and langston hughes. i memorized shakespeare, whole plays, 50 sonnets. i memorized edgar allen poe, all the poetry -- never having heard it, i memorized it. i had longfellow, i had guy de maupassant, i had balzac, rudyard kipling. i mean, it was catholic kind of reading, and catholic kind of storing. when i decided to speak, i had a lot to say, and many ways in which to say what i had to say. i listened to the black minister, i listened to the melody of the preachers, and i could tell when they would start up on that kind of thing, when you know they mean to take our souls straight to heaven, or whether they meant to dash us straight to hell, i understood it. so out of this evil, which was a dire kind of evil -- because rape on the body of a young person, more often than not, introduces cynicism, and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. in my case i was saved in that muteness, you see. in the sordida, i was saved

sexuality alone -- a lot of times morality is applied to sexuality, and so then you have people like langston hughes and james baldwin and many others who have that part of their life has to be -- i remember when i was seven, at victory baptist day school in los angeles not the neighborhood you're living in. i remember they had a church, and we all had to go to the church. i didn't want to go. and on every seat there was a -- the fire next time, and bald win came to address us and it was so wonderful because there was a sense of transcendence. the words and the arguments were good and well but there was a sense of transcendens that we had to gestured and we were in different plays. >> imani perry, there is an american morality? >> so, i think there is in the united states an ongoing and deep and pervasive practice of immorality and amorality, reacting from genocide's to enslavement to jim crow to what we have now kind of absolute mass incarceration, all these forms of devastation, and i think that what it occasions the kind of encounter with depth of both immorality and amorality, occasions a kind o