It was also in Topeka where Hughes made his first discoveries about race. As the only Negro attending a white school he was occasionally exposed to beatings from other students and insults from one of the teachers. Most of the teachers were generally kind to him however, and some of the kids took up for him. As Langston later recalls "So I learned early not to hate all white people," "And ever since it has seemed to me that most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been." (Haskins 4). .
The now 14 teen year-old Hughes was elected class poet and giving the opportunity to give the graduation speech at the elementary school. This was the first time Langston wrote poetry; and he liked it. After graduating from Lincoln elementary school, Langston moved with his mother and step-father to Cleveland Ohio. The city opened a new world to the small town boy from Kansas. There he attended Central High School, and met newly arrived immigrant children from Poland, Russian, and Germany. In school he enjoyed the work read to him by his teachers of Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsey, and Edgar Lee Masters. In the summers following he spent with his father in Mexico, where he taught school and received his first publishing opportunity in The Brownies Book, a magazine sponsored by the NAACP (Dickinson 12). The eventual collapse of The Brownies Book in 1921 had and effect of Hughes career. Six months after his first poem appeared in the juvenile organ of the NAACP, he placed "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" in its official journal the Crisis. The Crisis was a publishing phenomenon. Nine Years after its origin in 1910, copies were being distributed monthly to 100,000 readers (Dickenson 14). After his boring stints in Mexico, Hughes enrolled at Columbia University in New York, not so much for the academics but at the chance to see Harlem. It is hardly surprising that with this goal college was a waste of time (Dickenson 14).