Langston Hughes Family Roots
By Michael L. Jones
In the late 1890s, John Sanford Perry Hughes struck oil on land he owned in Oklahoma. After leasing the land, he moved to Los Angeles, where he became a successful real estate speculator. In addition to being a prominent businessman, Hughes was also the favorite uncle of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. In the second of his two-volume biography of the poet, Arnold Rampersad writes that before he died in 1971 “John Hughes begged Langston to promise him that he would be buried near his parents in a cemetery close to the Indiana farm on which he had grown up in the late nineteenth century.”
John is buried in the Charlestown Cemetery in a family plot near his parents, James Henry and Emily Hughes. Charlestown is a small Southern Indiana town of about 8,000 people that is 20 minutes from my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. I’m very familiar with Charlestown because one of my first writing jobs was as the Clark County Government reporter for the Jeffersonville Evening News in the late 1990s. Part of my duties involved covering the redevelopment of the Indiana Army Ammunition Plant, a former military factory in Charlestown that had been decommissioned and returned to the local municipalities from whom the government had taken land to create the facility.
In the two years that I spent interviewing politicians and residents in Charlestown, not once did the Hughes family or its connection to the area come up. In fact, whenever someone did pitch me a story about local celebrities it was usually blind bluegrass fiddler Michael Cleveland or Travis Meeks, founder of the rock band Days of the New. As it turns out, the Hughes family has deep roots in both Kentucky and Indiana.
Langston’s grandfather James H. Hughes was the child of two Kentucky slaves and both of their fathers were well-known white men in the state. His maternal grandfather was Silas Cushenberry, a Jewish trader in Clark County, Kentucky. His paternal grandfather was a Henry County, Kentucky distiller named Sam Clay, who was possibly a relative of the Great Compromiser Henry Clay. James met his wife Emily in Kentucky and they moved to Indiana before the Civil War. Charlestown is where their four oldest children were born, including John Hughes and James Nathaniel Hughes, Langston’s father.
James Nathaniel lived in Louisville long enough to pass the postal civil service exam, although he was never hired by the post office. This is interesting because Langston Hughes’ fellow Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen also had a connection to Louisville through a parent. Cullen was born Countee LeRoy Porter to Elizabeth Thomas Lucas and his birthplace has been alternatively given as Baltimore, New York City, and Louisville. Countee was adopted by Rev. Frederick and Carolyn Cullen of New York. But according to Gerald Early, Cullen often used Louisville as his birthplace on legal documents.
John S.P. and James Nathaniel Hughes were known as the “Gold Dust Twins” within their family because both went west in search of fortune. John worked on the railroad to raise the money to buy the land where he struck oil. James also ended up in Oklahoma, but he had less success on the business front there. This was something he blamed on racism.
James met his wife Carrie Mercer Langston in Oklahoma. She came from a respected African American family that illustrated the W.E.B. DuBois ideal of the “Talented Tenth.” Carrie’s mother Mary Leary was one of the first African American women to attend Oberlin College, and her uncle John Mercer Langston served as a Virginia congressman and a dean at Howard University.
James and Carrie married in the late 1890s, and their son James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. James abandoned his wife and child to settle first in Cuba and later in Mexico, where he hoped to have an easier time as a black man. Langston was raised by Carrie’s family in Kansas and later went to school in Cleveland. James did become a successful landowner there, but he and Langston had a contentious relationship until his death because he did not support his son’s passion for writing or his love of black people.
Langston inherited his artistic temperament from his mother, who had written for a newspaper in Kansas and loved theatre. He graduated from high school in Cleveland and set out to be the great poet that we all know. But he did not forget about his Kentuckiana connections and his relatives in the area never forgot him. In fact, they celebrate their connection to the famous poet to this day.
The Langston Hughes Family Museum was established in 2007 to under the umbrella of Hughes Family Interest, Inc. The collection contains more than 175 family artifacts including personal items from Langston and other family members. They are stored in Gary, Indiana, but the museum is a traveling exhibit that is curated by Marjol Rush-Collet, the poet’s second cousin. According to the museum, Langston reconnected with the other Hughes after he achieved literary fame: “Finally in 1958, after searching for many years, the newly found cousins provided Langston Hughes with knowledge of his father's family. Seeing an image of his grandmother, Emily Hughes for the first time, touching a garment she wore and meeting and interacting with those relatives that had been lost and at last finally found.”
Langston Hughes will forever be connected to Harlem in the public imagination. But the museum is an important reminder that the people that shaped him originated in the Midwest and the West. The poet carried that legacy within him.
