Mary Sampson Leary Langston | |
---|---|
Born | c. 1835 |
Died | 1915 (aged 79–80) |
Spouses |
|
Children | Lois Leary, Carolina Langston, Nat Turner Langston |
Relatives | Langston Hughes (grandson) |
Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston (c. 1835-1915) was an American abolitionist, the first African-American woman to attend Oberlin College, and wife of notable abolitionists Lewis Sheridan Leary and Charles Henry Langston. She was also the grandmother of Langston Hughes and raised him for part of his childhood, inspiring his future work.
Mary Sampson Patterson was born in North Carolina in about 1835. She claimed that her grandparents had been a French trader and a Cherokee woman. [1] [2] She was born free, and was raised as the ward of a mason and his wife. [3] Her father, John E. Patterson, [4] would take in slaves as apprentices, in order to help them obtain freedom, and then helped them move to the North. [1]
In 1855, Patterson survived an attempted enslavement. Following this, she moved to Oberlin, Ohio in 1857, [5] where she was the first black woman to attend the preparatory department of Oberlin College. [6] Accounts vary as to whether she attended the college itself. [3] [7]
Patterson married fellow Fayetteville-native Lewis Sheridan Leary, [8] [9] a fugitive slave and abolitionist, on May 12, 1858. [7] [10] [5] While little is known of their courtship, they may have known each other as children. [5] Shortly after their marriage, she abandoned her studies. [7] Together, they operated a station on the Underground Railroad. [11] In 1859, Leary went on a trip, leaving behind an either new mother or pregnant Mary. [3] [7] He participated in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and was killed in the aftermath. [12] [13] [14] According to Hughes, a friend returned Leary's shawl to Mary and was treasured throughout the rest of her life, though this story may be apocryphal. [7] [15] The shawl, which some theorize Leary used to create a quilt, [16] accompanied Hughes throughout his life. [5] Leary advocated for the reburial of the victims of the raid. [17]
Shortly before or after the raid on Harper's Ferry, Leary gave birth to a daughter. Her name varies based on source, including Lois, Louise, Loise, and Louisa. [18] She temporarily lived with her parents, [4] and abolitionists Wendell Phillips and James Redpath aided Leary in raising her daughter. Over the next several years, Leary unsuccessfully attempted to obtain a job teaching freed slaves, and was offered and turned down the opportunity to emigrate to Haiti as an honored guest. [3] In the 1860 Census, she was listed as a milliner. [19]
On January 18, 1869, Mary married one of Lewis's friends and fellow abolitionist Charles Henry Langston. [20] [21] In 1872, they moved to Lawrence, Kansas. [22] The couple bought a house near Kansas University, where they opened a grocery store and raised a foster son, Desalines Langston. [20]
In 1870, the Langstons had a son, Nathaniel Turner Langston, named after Nat Turner. In January 1873, they had another child, Carolina "Carrie" Mercer Langston. [7] [3] [23]
In 1892, Charles died, leaving Mary "nothing but a pair of gold earrings and a mortgaged house." [20] In 1897, their son Nat Turner was killed in an accident at the flour mill where he worked. [3]
Carrie Langston married James Hughes, but they quickly separated, though not before having a son, Langston. Carrie and Langston returned to Kansas to live with Mary, as Hughes moved to Mexico to work as confidential secretary for the general manager of the Pullman Company. [3] [24] In 1906 Carrie left Langston with her mother so that she could pursue her own career. [20] Although Langston briefly lived with his mother at various points throughout his childhood, he was primarily raised by Mary and her friends, James and Mary Reed.
Mary raised Langston in poverty and relative isolation due to the segregation in Lawrence. [25] Hughes also recalled that, unlike other African American women in Lawrence, she would not work for others, and so did not take jobs like taking in washing or going out to cook for white families. [1] Often they would eat dandelion greens for dinner. In order to pay their mortgage, Mary would rent their home to college students, and she and Langston moved in with the Reeds. [20] [26] However, her storytelling made a large impact on him. She read him stories from the Bible and Grimm's Fairy Tales, but also told him stories about slavery, the fight against slavery, and their family.
In 1915, Mary Leary Langston died, leaving Langston to be raised briefly by his mother and stepfather, and then by Mary's friends, the Reeds. [20] After her death, Hughes recalled [1]
Through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying. When my grandmother died, I didn't cry, either. Something about my grandmother's stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything.
Aunt Sue has a head full of stories.
Aunt Sue has a whole heart full of stories.
Summer nights on the front porch
Aunt Sue cuddles a brown-faced child to her bosom
And tells him stories.
–Langston Hughes, from "Aunt Sue's Stories"
Langston Hughes was inspired by his grandmother in much of his poetry, most notably "Aunt Sue's Stories." [26] [27] The character of the story-telling grandmother is also present in Not Without Laughter in the character of Aunt Hager. [28]
Mary Langston also served as inspiration for Erica Dawson's poem "Langston Hughes’s Grandma Mary Writes a Love Letter to Lewis Leary Years after He Dies Fighting at Harper’s Ferry." [29]
John Brown was a prominent leader in the American abolitionist movement in the decades preceding the Civil War. First reaching national prominence in the 1850s for his radical abolitionism and fighting in Bleeding Kansas, Brown was captured, tried, and executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia for a raid and incitement of a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
Oberlin is a city in Lorain County, Ohio, United States. It is located about 31 miles (50 km) southwest of Cleveland within the Cleveland metropolitan area. The population was 8,555 at the 2020 census. Oberlin is the home of Oberlin College, a liberal arts college and music conservatory with approximately 3,000 students.
Mary Edmonia Lewis, also known as "Wildfire", was an American sculptor, of mixed African-American and Native American heritage. Born free in Upstate New York, she worked for most of her career in Rome, Italy. She was the first African-American and Native American sculptor to achieve national and then international prominence. She began to gain prominence in the United States during the Civil War; at the end of the 19th century, she remained the only Black woman artist who had participated in and been recognized to any extent by the American artistic mainstream. In 2002, the scholar Molefi Kete Asante named Edmonia Lewis on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
Charlotte Louise Bridges Forten Grimké was an African American anti-slavery activist, poet, and educator. She grew up in a prominent abolitionist family in Philadelphia. She taught school for years, including during the Civil War, to freedmen in South Carolina. Later in life she married Francis James Grimké, a Presbyterian minister who led a major church in Washington, DC, for decades. He was a nephew of the abolitionist Grimké sisters and was active in civil rights.
John Mercer Langston was an American abolitionist, attorney, educator, activist, diplomat, and politician. He was the founding dean of the law school at Howard University and helped create the department. He was the first president of what is now Virginia State University, a historically black college. He was elected a U.S. Representative from Virginia and wrote From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol; Or, the First and Only Negro Representative in Congress From the Old Dominion.
The tragic mulatto is a stereotypical fictional character that appeared in American literature during the 19th and 20th centuries, starting in 1837. The "tragic mulatto" is a stereotypical mixed-race person, who is assumed to be depressed, or even suicidal, because s/he fails to completely fit into the "white world" or the "Black world". As such, the "tragic mulatto" is depicted as the victim of the society that is divided by race, where there is no place for one who is neither completely "Black" nor "white".
The Oberlin–Wellington Rescue of 1858 in was a key event in the history of abolitionism in the United States. A cause celèbre and widely publicized, thanks in part to the new telegraph, it is one of the series of events leading up to Civil War.
Lewis Sheridan Leary was an African-American harnessmaker from Oberlin, Ohio, who joined John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, where he was killed.
John Anthony Copeland Jr. was born free in Raleigh, North Carolina, one of the eight children born to John Copeland Sr. and his wife Delilah Evans, free mulattos, who married in Raleigh in 1831. Delilah was born free, while John was manumitted in the will of his master. In 1843 the family moved north, to the abolitionist center of Oberlin, Ohio, where he later attended Oberlin College's preparatory division. He was a highly visible leader in the successful Oberlin-Wellington Rescue of 1858, for which he was indicted but not tried. Copeland joined John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry; other than Brown himself, he was the only member of John Brown's raiders that was at all well known. He was captured, and a marshal from Ohio came to Charles Town to serve him with the indictment. He was indicted a second time, for murder and conspiracy to incite slaves to rebellion. He was found guilty and was hanged on December 16, 1859. There were 1,600 spectators. His family tried but failed to recover his body, which was taken by medical students for dissection, and the bones discarded.
Osborne Perry Anderson was an African-American abolitionist and the only surviving African-American member of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. He became a soldier in the Union Army during the American Civil War.
Charles Henry Langston (1817–1892) was an American abolitionist and political activist who was active in Ohio and later in Kansas, during and after the American Civil War, where he worked for black suffrage and other civil rights. He was a spokesman for blacks of Kansas and "the West".
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."
Harriet Forten Purvis was an African-American abolitionist and first generation suffragist. With her mother and sisters, she formed the first biracial women's abolitionist group, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. She hosted anti-slavery events at her home and with her husband Robert Purvis ran an Underground Railroad station. Robert and Harriet also founded the Gilbert Lyceum. She fought against segregation and for the right for blacks to vote after the Civil War.
Mary Evans Wilson (1866-1928) was one of Boston's leading civil rights activists. She was a founding member of the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the founder of the Women's Service Club.
Anna Evans Murray (1857–1955) was an American civic leader, educator, and early advocate of free kindergarten and the training of kindergarten teachers. In 1898 she successfully lobbied Congress for the first federal funds for kindergarten classes, and introduced kindergarten to the Washington, D.C. public school system.
Nettie Langston Napier was an African-American activist for the rights of women of color during the early part of the 20th century. She lived in Nashville, Tennessee.
Carolina Mercer Langston was an American writer and actress. She was the mother of poet, playwright and social activist Langston Hughes.
Mary Jane Richardson Jones was an American abolitionist, philanthropist, and suffragist. Born in Tennessee to free black parents, Jones and her family moved to Illinois during her teenage years. Along with her husband, John Jones, she was a leading African-American figure in the early history of Chicago. The Jones household was a stop on the Underground Railroad and a center of abolitionist activity in the pre–Civil War era, helping hundreds of fugitives fleeing slavery.
"Mother to Son" is a 1922 poem written by Langston Hughes. The poem follows a mother speaking to her son about her life, which she says "ain't been no crystal stair". She first describes the struggles she has faced and then urges him to continue moving forward. It was referenced by Martin Luther King Jr. several times in his speeches during the civil rights movement, and has been analyzed by several critics, notably for its style and representation of the mother.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link){{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link){{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)