Carrie Langston Hughes


Carolina Mercer Langston was an American writer, actress and mother to poet, playwright and social activist Langston Hughes.

Childhood and family background

Carolina Mercer Langston was the daughter of Charles Langston and Mary Leary.
Carrie Langston's father, Charles Howard Langston, was the son of a prosperous Virginia planter and an slave woman of both American Indian and African descent. An ardent abolitionist and follower of John Brown, he also served as associate editor of the ''Historic Times, as president of the local Colored Benevolent Society, and as grandmaster of Lawrence's Black Masonic Fraternity.
His brother, John Mercer Langston, was a post-emancipation congressman from Virginia who later served as Minister to Haiti and Dean of Howard University's Law School.
Mary Leary's first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, died in 1859 from injuries incurred aiding John Brown during the Harper's Ferry raid on the federal arsenal. Leary's bloodied bullet-riddled death shroud, sent to Mary Leary as a sign of his death, would become a significant family symbol: grandson Langston Hughes placed it in a New York City Fifth Avenue bank safe deposit box in 1928.
Carrie Langston had a foster brother, Desalines ; a half-sister, Loise ; and a brother, Nathaniel Turner Langston. Nathaniel Turner Langston was born in 1870 and killed in a flour mill accident at age 27.

Social and political significance

At fifteen, Carrie Mercer Langston was a "belle of black society" in Lawrence, Kansas. At eighteen, she was publicly reading papers she'd written and recited an original poem before the Inter-State Literary Society. She became central to Lawrence's St. Luke's Progressive Club and was elected 'Critic' by a rival society at the Warren Street Second Baptist Church. In 1892, American Citizen newspaper dubbed Carrie Langston and three others as "the most beautiful girls in Kansas."
As a young, single, black woman at the end of the nineteenth century, Carrie Langston wrote for The Achison Blade, a family-operated African-American newspaper published out of Achison, Kansas. In 1892, in The Achison Blade, Carrie Langston refuted what she termed, "the male notion," that females were content with their position in life. Her writing was clearly influenced by her father and his support of the 1867 women's suffrage movement in Kansas. Her words were aimed at Midwestern black men who maintained strict ideas about women's place in society. She boldly chastised in print any men who relegated women to inferior societal positions. She especially encouraged the participation of Black women in politics. She spoke publicly on women in journalism, addressed A.M.E. Church conventions, and served as deputy clerk in a district court office.

Personal life

Carrie Langston's first marriage was to James Hughes, a descendant of two prominent white Kentucky grandfathers and African-descendant grandmothers. Their wedding was an elopement, a civil ceremony on April 30, 1899 in Guthrie, Oklahoma, with neither friends nor family attending. 'Shotgun wedding' rumors spread, though she may have became pregnant within days of their marriage. The couple moved to Joplin, Missouri where James Hughes got a job as a stenographer and Carrie Langston Hughes experienced a miscarriage. From Joplin, the couple moved to Buffalo, New York with plans to move to Cuba. Carrie Langston Hughes learned she was pregnant again; she returned to Joplin. However James Hughes, seeking to escape segregation in the U.S., moved to Mexico where he spent most of the rest of his life becoming fairly prosperous. Carrie gave birth on February 1, 1902 to James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri. Carrie hoped to reunite with her husband so when Langston was five years old she took him to Mexico to meet his father. While there, Mexico was struck by the historic April 14, 1907 earthquake. That event sent Carrie Langston Hughes with her son swiftly back to the States; young Langston Hughes witnessed prayer and wreckage there from his father's shoulders impacting him for the rest of his life, as evidenced in his later writing.
Mother and son returned to Lawrence where she left her son to be cared for by her mother while she moved to Topeka. Carrie Langston Hughes returned several months later to take her son to Topeka planning to enroll him in the Harrison Street School. Harrison's principal, Eli S. Foster, demanded Langston attend the more-distant 'colored children's' Washington School. Carrie Langston Hughes claimed her young son could not walk that distance daily but she still met resistance; she took her case to the Topeka Board of Education and won. But before the end of the school year, Langston was back with his grandmother in Lawrence. Almost fifty years later, in a federal lawsuit regarding the same school board, a Supreme Court decision would end school segregation in the United States.
Carrie Langston Hughes called herself different names throughout her life; these names included Caroline Langston, Carolyn Hughes, Carolyn Hughes Clark sometimes spelled Clarke, and Carrie Clark or Clarke. She also lived many places with and without her son while he was growing up. As a result, Langston Hughes was raised for the most part by Carrie Langston's mother, Mary Leary, in Lawrence, Kansas with his mother making occasional visits.
Carrie Langston's peripatetic life was driven by job searches and boredom. The deaths of her parents left her bereft of both the political privileges they had provided and the social consciousness they had instilled in her. Her second husband, Homer Clark, had a son from a previous alliance named Gwyn Shannon Clark who accompanied Carrie Langston through most of the rest of her adult life.
In March 1933, Carrie Langston's lifelong wish to be an actress of some success was fulfilled: she appeared on Broadway as Sister Susie May Hunt in Hall Johnson's theatrical production, Run, Little Chillun.
James Nathaniel Hughes, Langston Hughes's father, died on October 22, 1934 of complications from several strokes; neither Carrie Langston nor Langston Hughes were mentioned in his will.
On May 14, 1935, in a letter to Langston Hughes who was living in Mexico, Carrie Langston wrote of "a very bad blood tumor" on her breast; on June 3, 1938, Carrie Langston died of breast cancer.
Carrie Langston counted among her friends Zora Neale Hurston.