Langston Hughes, born this day in 1902

Today is the birthday of Langston Hughes, the great African-American poet and playwright. Hughes was named after his maternal grandfather, Charles Langston, who had been one of the defendants in the Oberlin Rescue trials of 1859. Following his conviction for violating the Fugitive Slave Act, Charles Langston made an impassioned speech at sentencing, in which he vowed to continue resistance to slavery:

If ever a man is seized near me, and is about to be carried southward as a slave, then are thrown back upon those last defences of our rights, which cannot be taken from us, and which God gave us that we need not be slaves.

I must take upon myself the responsibility of self-protection; and when I come to be claimed by some perjured wretch as his slave, I shall never be taken into slavery . . . . I stand her to say that I will do all I can, for any man thus seized and held.

But Charles Langston was not the only important abolitionist figure in Hughes’s background. This excerpt is from Garrison Keillor’s Writers’ Almanac:

[Langston Hughes’s] parents got divorced when he was a baby and he was sent to live with his grandmother, Mary Leary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. His grandmother’s first husband was Lewis Sheridan Leary, a harness maker and abolitionist. Leary joined John Brown in the raid on Harper’s Ferry, and he was killed there. Mary kept Leary’s bloodstained shawl, and when her grandson was a baby she wrapped him in it. After she died, he inherited the shawl. Many years later, his apartment in Harlem flooded, and the shawl was the only item that he salvaged.

Lewis Sheridan Leary was born in North Carolina and moved to Oberlin, Ohio, as a young man. He was an ardent member of the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society, and was recruited to John Brown’s army by John Brown, Jr., with an assist from John Mercer Langston (Charles’s younger brother). Along with John Anthony Copeland (his relative by marriage), Leary departed Oberlin for Virginia in the fall of 1859, arriving at Brown’s headquarters only a few days before the raid on Harper’s Ferry. He died in combat on the second day of fighting.

The shawl story, however, is almost certainly a myth. Leary had been assigned to take and hold Hall’s Rifle Factory, along with Copeland and John Kagi. The three abolitionists held off repeated assaults by the local militia, until they realized that their position was hopeless. They fled through the back door and waded into the nearby Shenandoah River, where Leary and Kagi were shot. Kagi died instantly, but Leary survived and was dragged to shore. He lived in agony for another 12 hours. Copeland was captured alive and held for trial in nearby Charles Town

There were many witnesses to Leary’s capture and death – none of whom said anything about a shawl, much less retrieving and sending one back to Ohio. A shawl would have been an odd garment to wear into battle, and it would have come off in any case as the wounded Leary thrashed about in the river.

The outraged Virginians, of course, were hardly likely to show any compassion for Leary’s widow, and they were the only ones who could have sent her the shawl. In fact, their reaction to the dead and captured raiders was quite the opposite. They mutilated the corpse of Dangerfield Newby, a freed slave who was the first of Brown’s men to fall. They used Kagi’s body for target practice, and they murdered another of the raiders – William Thompson, Brown’s son-in-law – after he surrendered.

Even two months later, after Copeland was tried and hanged, the Virginia authorities would not cooperate by returning his body to Oberlin for burial. Instead, it was seized by a group of medical students for use as a cadaver, and they threatened violence when a family representative attempted to retrieve the corpse.

In 1860, less than a year after the events, the African-American journalist William Cooper Nell wrote a series of articles about the “colored heroes of Harper’s Ferry.”  His extended account of Leary’s life, including his marriage to Mary and the birth of their daughter, said nothing about the retrieval of a shawl, which certainly would have been worth mentioning. Nor was there anything about a shawl in the many abolitionist newspapers that carried accounts of Leary’s death, including The Liberator, the Oberlin Evangelist, the Pine & Palm, or the Provincial Freedman (edited by Mary Ann Shadd Cary, who first used the phrase “colored heroes.”)

It is understandable, of course, that Mary Leary Langston would tell her grandson stories about her first husband, and that Hughes would believe them. Perhaps that shawl had even once belonged to Leary, who had departed for Harper’s Ferry with only the clothes on his back. In any case, the effect on Langston Hughes was profound, and he never forgot his connection to John Brown. One of his most memorable poems was “October the Sixteenth,” commemorating the date of the Harper’s Ferry Raid:

Perhaps

You will remember

John Brown.

John Brown

Who took his gun,

Took twenty-one companions,

White and Black,

Went to shoot your way to freedom.

Comments

[David Abraham]

I cannot comment on the veracity of the shawl episode except to say that shawls are among the most common of holy relics in Christian-infused narratives. In any event, viva the great Langston Hughes: everyone should read his short collection "The Panther and the Lash," which features an amazing couplet that moves us from liberal democracy to social democracy:
"I love Ralph Bunche
But I can't eat him for lunch."

[Steven Freedman]

It was no accident that Langston Hughes' grandmother ended up in Lawrence, KS. Lawrence was the center of the Free State movement during the Bleeding Kansas era and attracted many African American freemen and ex-slaves. John Brown's base of operation was located in the district, he even helped stave off an invasion of Lawrence in 1855 by rallying the townspeople to take positions against a Missouri militia (although he was not there to save Lawrence in 1856 and 1863 when pro-slavers sacked the town). With such a history, Lawrence was a natural location for his grandmother to settle in.

Although his childhood home no longer exists, the town commemorated him by naming an elementary school after him.

[cm]

You can see a photo of the shawl online. Hughes donated it to the Ohio Historical Society in 1943.

https://ohiohistory.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/an-ordinary-shawl-with-an-extraordinary-story/