Carrie Langston

Carolina Mercer Langston (January 18, 1873 – June 3, 1938) was an American writer and actress. She was the mother of poet, playwright and social activist Langston Hughes.

Childhood and family background Carolina (Carrie) Mercer Langston was the daughter of Charles Langston and Mary Leary (one of the first black women to attend Oberlin College).

Carrie Langston's father, Charles Henry Langston, was the son of a prosperous Virginia planter and an enslaved woman of American Indian and African descent.

Carrie Langston's paternal uncle, John Mercer Langston, was a post-emancipation congressman from Virginia, who later served as Minister to Haiti and Dean of Howard University School of Law.

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. In 1892, The American Citizen newspaper dubbed Carrie Langston and three others as "the most beautiful colored girls in Kansas".

Langston wrote for The Atchison Blade, a family-operated African-American newspaper published in Atchison, Kansas. In 1892, writing as a young, single, black woman, she refuted what she termed "the male notion" that women were content with their position in life. Her writing was influenced by her father and his support of the 1867 Kansas suffrage referendum. Her words were aimed at Midwestern black men who maintained conservative ideas about women's place in society. She especially encouraged the participation of Black women in politics. She spoke publicly on women in journalism, addressed African Methodist Episcopal 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 grandfathers from Kentucky and two grandmothers of African descent. The couple eloped The couple moved to Joplin, Missouri, where James Hughes began working 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 and returned to Joplin. However, James Hughes, seeking to escape racial segregation in the United States, 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. She returned several months later to take her son to Topeka, planning to enroll him in the Harrison Street School. The principal of the school, Eli S. Foster, demanded that 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. with his mother making occasional visits. in Hall Johnson's theatrical production, Run, Little Chillun.

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.