Langston Hughes—known early in his career as “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” and, now, as the preeminent poet of the Harlem Renaissance—was 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri to Carrie Langston and Charles Hughes.

Recent revelations from historical African American weekly newspapers strongly suggest his 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡 year as 1901, though he believed that he had been 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 a year later. Hughes’s 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡 date was never officially noted because Missouri did not require the registration of 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡s.

In the first installment of his autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes noted that he could not truly consider himself Black, due to the “different kinds of blood in [his] family.” His mother, Mary Langston, was 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 to Charles Langston and Mary Sampson Patterson. Mary was of French and indigenous ancestry on her mother’s side. Hughes recalled that she “looked like an Indian—with very long black hair.” Mary had first married a free Black man named Sheridan Leary in Oberlin, Ohio, where she had attended college. Unbeknownst to Mary, her husband left home to join John Brown during the abolitionist’s raid at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia. Leary died on the first night of the rebellion. Not long after her first husband’s death, Mary met Langston, who owned both a farm and a grocery store in Lawrence, Kansas. Like Leary, Langston was deeply invested in politics, so much so that he left his businesses to languish. After he died, he left his family with no money but plenty of his speeches.