James Mercer Langston Hughes was born to Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes and James Nathaniel Hughes on 1 February 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. On his mother's side the family had a fairly prominent place in the history of emancipation. His grandfather, Charles Howard Langston, married in 1869 the poet's grandmother Mary Leary, widow of one of the casualties of John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, and in 1870 he moved with her to the abolitionist stronghold of Lawrence, Kansas. Charles Langston was, like his brother John Mercer Langston (1829-1897), an active abolitionist and the first Afro-American representative to Congress from Virginia. Carrie Langston, the poet's mother, had had a year of college and had literary inclinations which included writing poetry but which more frequently manifested themselves in the recitation of dramatic monologues in costume. James Nathaniel Hughes, the poet's father, was an ambitious man, who, after the frustration of studying law by correspondence course from Chicago and then being denied permission by the all-white examining board to take the Oklahoma Territory bar examination, moved to Joplin in 1899 with his wife. There, after four years of marriage and the death of his first child (in 1900), angered by unremitting poverty and faced with supporting an eighteen-month-old child, the hard-working James Hughes, driven by ambitions and hungers that racial prejudice denied, left the United States in October 1903 for Mexico, where he eventually prospered and thus was able to contribute to the support of his son.
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