langston hughes grandfather

Some of the militiamen waded in after them, while others stood on the riverbank and, as Copeland later put it, “opened a hot fire on us from all sides.”. Nor is it plausible that a “friend” would later have retrieved a shawl and sent it back to Oberlin, if only because Leary and the surviving raiders had no friends in Harpers Ferry. No, not the slave trading; the Jewish part. The couple became affluent, thanks to Matthew’s skill as an artisan and investments in land, and they lived in a fine house where they raised five children. Langston Hughes made it clear during his lifetime that his racial background was varied. Both light and insects have readier access to the folded edge than to the larger planes of the fabric. Langston’s paternal grandmother was named Emma Emily Quisenberry/Cushenberry (the daughter of Silas Quisenberry/Cushenberry). Report scam, HUMANITIES, Summer 2016, Volume 37, Number 3, State and Jurisdictional Humanities Councils, HUMANITIES: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, six summer institutes at Colgate University, SUBSCRIBE FOR HUMANITIES MAGAZINE PRINT EDITION, Sign up for HUMANITIES Magazine newsletter, Frederick Douglass Once Turned to Fiction to Describe What He Considered True Heroism, Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War, Chronicling America: History American Newspapers. He was born on February 1,1902 in Joplin, Missouri, Langston’s great grandmothers and grandfathers were slaves. Brown’s main force in the armory managed to hold out until Tuesday morning, when they were routed by a contingent of United States Marines that had arrived under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee. Her second husband (Hughes’s grandfather) was a fierce abolitionist. After that, Leary simply disappeared, without even a word of good-bye to Mary and Loise. The other he embraced. Hughes of course was both black and gay, but he could only hide one of those things. One of them was known as Sam Clay, who was related to Henry Clay on Hughes’ great grandfather… He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was i… Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934). Negroes have enough crosses to bear.". The Leary children had advantages undreamed of by most African Americans in the antebellum South. Charles Langston (Grandfather of Langston Hughes) Danita Smith - BlackandEducation.com. The actual event occurred on Christmas Day and featured an address by Professor James Monroe, who had recently returned from his failed mission to Virginia, where he sought to claim the body of John Anthony Copeland. Their “only means of escape, if any” was to swim for it, so they “turned and fired one round” before plunging into the water. An examination of the shawl also reveals no signs of either bullet holes or bloodstains. The Harpers Ferry raid and its aftermath are among the most evocative events in the long struggle to abolish slavery that led to the Civil War. Lewis Sheridan Leary was broad-shouldered and muscular, with high cheekbones, dark eyes, arched eyebrows, and a light reddish complexion indicative of his white and Native American ancestors. Here’s an excerpt: "Unfortunately (and to John’s distrust of God) it seems his son was turning out to be a queer. Carrie and James did not have a stable marriage. Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934). 1 min read. His paternal great-grandfather was of Jewish descent. Their youngest child was Lewis Sheridan Leary. . daughter Caroline was the mother of Langston Hughes. . Langston Hughes had many difficulties throughout his life, but prevailed to become a famous writer during the Harlem Renaissance. Two of Brown’s men who had been left to guard the bridge were discovered by a railroad baggage agent—a free black man named Hayward Shepherd—whom they mistakenly shot and killed. The fact that gray woolen shawls were depicted on the defendants in newspaper images of the Harpers Ferry raid trial, and later documented when their bodies were exhumed and reinterred, increases the psychological likelihood that the history of the gray shawls worn in court would adhere to the yellow and blue one in Oberlin. Only eight years old at the time, Hughes may not have fully understood Roosevelt’s promise that “the name of John Brown will be forever associated” with the “heroic struggle” for freedom. “One of the most treasured objects” in the collection of the Ohio History Connection in Columbus is item H 6806, which, at first, seems to be a rather ordinary handwoven wool twill shawl. Quite apart from the provenance of his shawl, then, Hughes had good reasons to take enormous pride in the antislavery heroism of his grandmother’s two husbands—Lewis Sheridan Leary and his grandfather Charles Langston, for whom he was named. It is possible that over time the two shawl stories became conflated in the way such narratives routinely are in human recollections. The historically black college Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where Langston Hughes studied, has receivedthree grants to support and preserve its collections and archives. Scholars overlooked Hughes’s blatant gayness for years, and many continue to do so. A few weeks later his shawl came back to her full of bullet holes.” Hughes’s biographer, Arnold Rampersad, wrote that “a friend brought [Leary’s] bloodstained, bullet-ridden shawl” back to Oberlin, and that it remained a symbol for Mary of his martyrdom. A few weeks before the raid, a Philadelphia supporter of Brown’s sent a shipment of “blanket shawls” to his headquarters. Was it the maternal grandfather for whom Delmar, “Delly,” was named? The American Revolution in such places as Schoharie County, New York, was a bloody civil war, but the war as a whole has been polished by more than two centuries of consensus into simply a battle for freedom. 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. Official segregation still ruled the roost and homosexuals were neither seen nor heard in 1902. The world is a much different place than when Langston Hughes came into it 112 years ago. Tom Daley Wins (Another) Gold Medal, Breaks Records, Don Lemon Has Already Announced His New Show After 'CNN Tonight', NYC Pride Bans Police Groups From Marching Until 2025, 'Drag Race Espana's 12 Member Pit Crew Has Us Sweating Already, Don Lemon Is Ending 'CNN Tonight,' Effective Immediately, Billy Porter Dazzles in 'Cinderella' Remake First Look Photo, An All LGBTQ+ Version of ‘Legally Blonde’ Is Coming to NewFest. Emma was born in Kentucky. It was not many months after Loise’s birth, in late August 1859, that John Brown Jr. arrived in Oberlin, seeking recruits for the liberation army that his father was assembling for the Harpers Ferry operation. Hughes himself once explained that he had exposed the shawl to a moth infestation, having stored it in a box along with a wool hat that was eaten “to a powder.” There are no obvious stains of any kind on the shawl, much less the characteristically brown, wash-fast imprint of blood, although there are faded areas, consistent with exposure to light. The Hughes shawl is what museum curators call an “association object,” an item we value not for what it can tell us about the past or its aesthetic properties, but for its association, real or imputed, with someone or something imbued with sociocultural mystique. This story is for the most part apocryphal, however, seemingly derived many years later from the Book of Exodus. Stella Carlson, 82, late of Hegewisch, passed away Friday, March 9, 2001 at St. Margaret Mercy Hospital. And, obviously, it helps identify history that is important to remember. SFX. The couple moved to Joplin, Missouri, where James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in 1902. First, because of the unspoken edict on “icky” gays, and, second, because of African-American communities’s historic hang-ups on homosexuality. Ten of the raiders had been killed in battle, five had escaped, and seven—including Brown and Copeland—were eventually captured, tried, and hanged. Born in Joplin, Mo., Langston Hughes grew up in eastern Kansas, living in Lawrence, Topeka and Kansas City. Langston Hughes was a popular African-American writer and main figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Likewise, in her 1908 interview with Katherine Mayo, who was then a researcher for Brown’s biographer Oswald Garrison Villard, Mary said nothing about owning a shawl or any other item of Lewis Sheridan Leary’s. Hughes's sense of dedication was instilled in him most of all by his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, whose first husband had died at Harpers Ferry as a member of John Brown's band, and whose second husband (Hughes's grandfather) had also been a militant abolitionist. Mary Leary remained in Oberlin following Lewis’s death, supporting herself and her daughter by working as a milliner. Hughes's father left his family and later divorced Carrie, going to Cuba, and then Mexico, seeking … The blue, which remains fast after nearly a century and a half, is almost certainly indigo. This shawl has the power to make the heart race and the imagination open wide to an incredible series of connections between a famous twentieth-century name and a significant nineteenth-century tragedy. The father then tries to figure out how his son could have been gay. Impossible! Perhaps you're referring to Langston Hughes' grandfather, Charles Henry Langston, a black activist during the 19th century. Martin Luther King used repetition, metaphors,, and past … Her first husband had died at Harper's Ferry fighting with John Brown; her second husband, Langston Hughes's grandfather, was a prominent Kansas politician during Reconstruction. Copeland was studious by nature, attending the Preparatory Department (that is, high school) of Oberlin College, where he studied composition and religion. We're not sure if it was Hughes himself that was mistaken, or the people who supposedly quoted him. As his biographer put it, Hughes had been “born into a relationship with his family’s past, into a relationship with history, so intimate as to be almost sensual.” He knew that Charles Langston had risked almost everything in the fight against slavery, even defying the white judge of a United States court to declare that he would continue to resist with force, “if ever a man is seized near me, and is about to be carried Southward as a slave.” And of Leary, Hughes wrote, he was “shot attacking, believing in John Brown [because he] always did believe people should be free.” The old shawl may have provided a meaningful physical representation of his ancestors’ struggle, but it did not define Hughes’s admiration for John Brown and his men. Sheridan Leary wore this shawl when he went from Oberlin, Ohio, to join John Brown in order to help him create the slave revolt which they hoped might free the Negroes. The poet also included a brief account of it in his autobiography, noting that Leary had left Oberlin without disclosing his destination, “except that he told [Mary] he was going on a trip. He was a great poet and inspired others. A light shawl is not the sort of garment to wear when aiming and firing a rifle, and it would have been cumbersome to clutch while racing through the factory’s back door to escape the militia’s fusillade. The local militia assembled in response, surrounding Brown’s redoubt at the armory. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry.Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance.He famously wrote about the … While there are holes in the shawl, their placement, shape, and edge characteristics are inconsistent with penetration by projectiles, a subject well understood by experts in textile and apparel forensics. Langston had been a leader of Ohio’s black abolitionist movement, and he had been indicted and convicted under the Fugitive Slave Act for his role in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue of 1858. By the time the survivors were arraigned, the remains of Leary and the other slain raiders had been interred, stuffed into two large wooden crates, and buried in an unmarked grave about half a mile from town. Whatever is to blame, this queerness will not be addressed. His parents divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. Lewis Sheridan Leary died on Monday, October 17, 1859, having given his life in an attempt to bring freedom to Virginia’s slaves. In 1869 she married Charles Langston, 20 years her senior. In 1973, NEH decided in favor of a grant to support Arna Bontemps, friend and collaborator of Langston Hughes, in the writing of an authorized biography of Langston Hughes. It may be that Fayetteville had become “too hot” for Lewis, as his widow later recalled, but the likely cause was a falling-out with his father, perhaps over the latter’s indulgence of slavery. At the same time, Hughes struggled with a sense of desolation fostered by parental neglect. “Hughes's closet was a carefully constructed fortress that he built himself, but it is now guarded by the arbiters of all that is black and cultural, as they ignore the contributions of black gays and lesbians,” writes the excellent and gay-friendly black history site I’ll Keep You Posted. Charles Langston was Langston Hughes's grandfather. In contrast to his parents, young Lewis was said to disdain any accommodation with slavery, which may have led to his departure from North Carolina in 1854. Its faded yellow lines, or “tan” as the catalog record describes them, could have been made with any of a number of natural dyestuffs available in that era, such as walnuts or dandelions. The reflex to make civil religion of ordinary material culture is, as computer scientists say, “not a bug but a feature” of human nature. For their entire lives, both Langston and Carrie Hughes firmly believed that the shawl had been sent to Mary, “bullet-riddled and bloodstained,” after Lewis Leary’s death. In the aftermath of the raid, the entire region, and much of Virginia, remained a virtual armed camp, and strangers—especially those suspected of Northern sympathies—were turned away at the border. Because his father emigrated to Mexico and his mother was often away, Hughes was brought up in Lawrence, Kansas, by his grandmother Mary Langston. I know Corbin Fletcher is buried in Hallwood in Grotons cemetery. Charles and Mary were both free blacks that were educated at Oberlin College in Ohio. This effect, known as “misattribution,” is a common error in human memory, one with serious consequences for the reliability of eyewitness testimony and a hazard pointed out as early as 1959 by neurologist Lawrence Schlesinger Kubie. Four other raiders were arraigned that day, including Brown, but none of them wore shawls. In 1943, the shawl was donated by Langston Hughes, the great African-American poet and playwright. Abolitionism, John Brown, and the Civil War figure prominently in the history of NEH grantmaking. And it was Langston and his brother who first introduced Lewis Sheridan Leary to John Brown Jr. Charles and Mary soon had a son, whom they named after the rebellious slave Nat Turner. when Sheridan Leary went away” in September 1859, when in fact Loise was already six months old, having been born the previous February. Charles Henry Langston, the grandfather of poet Langston Hughes, was born a free man on a Virginia plantation in 1817 to Captain Ralph Quarles and Lucy Jane Langston, Quarles’ mulatto slave. Such objects can pose ethical and cultural-sensitivity problems for museum professionals, who must balance respect for the documentary record with respect for family history and across identity groups with different agendas for the past. Hughes’s memories of being wrapped in it as a child lent even greater dramatic power to the story of the shawl, making it a part of his own origin story as well as a symbol of the family’s tradition of resistance to oppression and racism. Many believe “Poem (To F.S. His grandfather, Charles H. Langston, settled in Kansas in 1862. If any friend of Mary’s had delivered Leary’s shawl, it could have been Monroe. He was possibly the most famous young black man of the 1920s, and he used his fame not only to celebrate his race, but also laborers, the colonized and other oppressed people. There are other tales of long-ago claims to “Indian land,” much of the sort that grandparents tell children in every family. He first sought out Charles and John Mercer Langston, two highly accomplished African Americans who were leaders in Ohio’s abolitionist movement. [1] In 1888, Hughes' grand-uncle, John Mercer Langston, became the first African American to be elected to … They returned to kansas and bought a farm near Lakeview. )” was a poem to Ferdinand Smith, a sailor Hughes loved and lost. This has been done so consistently for a few reasons. Ann Hughes (hugann@onemain.com), Mon Oct 9 17:49:41 EDT 2000. Martin Luther King inspired other through his powerful and meaningful speeches,while Langston Hughes through his meticulously worded, artistic poems. Today in Gay History: The Great ‘Was Langston Gay?’ Debate. To his surprise, Featherstonhaugh discovered that the men had been buried with the blanket shawls as shrouds, “for great masses of woolen texture were found enveloping each body.”. Carrie Langston Hughes learned she was pregnant again; she returned to Joplin. According to Hughes, Mary “was with child . The father can only pray it will go away. Ralph Quarles had served in the Revolutionary War and was, … As did other prosperous free blacks in North Carolina, Matthew Leary was known to purchase slaves at auction, thereafter allowing them to work for their freedom. Patterson Leary Langston, was prominent in the African American community in Lawrence. Here's what makes it difficult: Hughes' supposed Jewish great-grandfather was a slave trader. Times continue to change, of course: more Americans embrace LGBT people and more black, gay celebrities are coming out of the closet, helping alleviate tensions between the communities. The shawls, which were heavy wool and dull colored, were worn by the men instead of overcoats on the late night march into Harpers Ferry. "...Both of Hughes' paternal and maternal great-grandmothers were African American, his maternal great-grandfather was white and of Scottish descent. The “gayest” of Hughes’s works, though, the one that scholars most point to when highlighting his homosexuality, is the short story “Blessed Assurance." “She still wore it fifty years after his death, or used it to cover her young grandchild, Langston Hughes, while he slept at night.”. Steven Lubet, the author of John Brown’s Spy and The “Colored” Hero of Harpers Ferry, is Williams Memorial Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. This is especially true of highly “memorable” events, such as the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, participation in battle, or a traumatic personal injury. In his poem “Harlem,” Langston Hughes asked, “What happens to a dream deferred?” It was a prophetic inquiry, one that questioned a society in which Black people continually faced racial injustice, even though the nation’s ideals were supposedly predi ... inspired by his scientist grandfather. The family eventually moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where Charles operated a grocery store until he died in 1892. Leary and Copeland, however, had almost no opportunity to become acquainted with their new comrades, as Brown ordered the invasion to begin on the night of Sunday, October 16. Leary was born in 1835, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to a prosperous family of “free Negroes,” who traced their ancestry to an Irish Revolutionary War veteran named Jeremiah O’Leary. His first collection of poetry The Weary Blues was published in 1926. It allows us to build group identities that enable important human achievements, of which the Revolutionary War and the civil rights movement are but two of many examples. But God, Nature,or somebodymade them that way. Not all went as planned. Both of his great-grandmothers were Black slaves. Langstons Hughes' Childhood. Hughes declined, and instead donated the shawl to the Ohio Historical Society, where it can be appreciated today as an early nineteenth-century artifact, handspun, with soft yarns probably produced on a wool or “walking” wheel. The two brothers demurred, but they offered to introduce Brown’s son to the two “bravest negroes” they knew: Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Anthony Copeland. Scam Advisory: Recent reports indicate that individuals are posing as the NEH on email and social media. Actor Earle Hyman is best known to American audiences as Grandfather Huxtable on the popular 1980s TV comedy “The Cosby Show.” Hyman’s long, distinguished international performing career will be the focus of the next Langston Hughes Visiting Professor Lecture at the University of Kansas. In fact, his paternal great-grandfather was a Jewish slave trader, while his maternal great-grandfather was a white captain. Meanwhile, another militia contingent rained fire on the rifle factory, where Leary, Copeland, and Kagi did their best to stand fast. The shawl seems to date from the early nineteenth century, its age evident from both its badly worn condition and the nature of its yarn and weave. (It was Charles who would become the grandfather of Langston Hughes.) They managed to repel six or seven attacks, holding firm until some time Monday morning, when their ammunition began to run low and their situation turned hopeless. There were numerous witnesses to Leary’s capture and death, but none of them—including the journalist who recorded his last words and a local woman who saw him floundering in the water—reported the presence of a shawl. Before he died, Leary at last sent word to Mary and Loise by asking a newspaper reporter “to inform them of the manner of his death.”. Her second husband, Hughes’s grandfather, was the brother of abolitionist John Mercer Langston and a participant in Kansas politics during Reconstruction. On May 12, 1858, Lewis married Mary Sampson Patterson, a student at Oberlin, who had arrived from Fayetteville the previous year. It took Brown’s men two hours to march the five miles into the sleeping town of Harpers Ferry. According to family lore, Lewis confronted an overseer who was whipping a slave and knocked the white man to the ground. Not good at all. This is what makes it nearly impossible for the National Park Service, even with the most conscientious curatorial truth-in-advertising, to convince visitors that the cabin at the traditional site of the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln is not, and cannot have been, the building in which Abraham Lincoln was born. Another poet, Frank Ocean, comes to mind. The Rev. They were educated by private tutors, attended fancy parties, and were waited upon by black servants, some of whom were slaves. They referred to it between themselves as the “Harpers Ferry shawl” and treated it with reverence. Hughes was born into a distinguished family. His grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston, raised him and influenced him by building a sense of family legacy and pride. Thus, when an object comes to have even a notional connection to a historical event, it is unlikely ever to lose the association, even if the light shed by documentary evidence makes the association unbelievable. Daniel J. Sharfstein received a research fellowship in 2004 for work that led to The Color Line: A History of Race, the Law, and American Lives, which described the abolitionist movement in Oberlin, Ohio. The Black Abolitionist Papers Projects and its director George Carter received six grants in the 1970s, while abolitionism, in general, has been the subject of numerous NEH-supported projects, including six summer institutes at Colgate University benefitting more than a hundred schoolteachers. It is as if the artifact embodies the spirit of the person, place, or event, what the Romans called numen. In 1910 she took him to hear former president Theodore Roosevelt speak in Osawatomie for the dedication of the John Brown Memorial Park, memorializing one of his Bleeding Kansas victories.