Essay About Langston Hughes And Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston

What Brought Our Ancestors to America?
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What was the dream that brought our ancestors to
America? It was rebirth, the craving for men to be born
again, the yearning for a second chance. With all of these
ideas comes the true American dream-Freedom. This is the
condition in which a man feels like a human being. It is the
purpose and consequence of rebirth. Throughout the life of
Langston Hughes he presented ideas in his writings that
help to define his perception of the American dream.In
beginning, Langston Hughes was born on February 1,
1902 in Joplin, Missouri. His father was James Nathaniel
Hughes, a man who studied law but was unable to take the
examination for the bar because he was black. His mother
was Carrie Hughes, a woman who studied at the University
of Kansas in an ongoing struggle to earn a living outside of
domestic labor. Langstons father left home to live in Cuba
and then Mexico to free himself from the Jim Crow laws
and Segregation. Hughes then went to live with his
grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas until he was thirteen. His
grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston,
was very prominent in the African American community of
Lawrence. Her first husband was killed at Harpers Ferry
while fighting with John Brown; her second husband,
Hughes grandfather, was a prominent politician in Kansas
during the Reconstruction. During the time that he lived with
his grandmother, however, she was old and poor resulting
in little to eat and forcing them to rent out part of their small
house. Unable to give Langston the attention he needed
and his feelings of hurt and rejection by both his mother and
father caused him to grow up very insecure and unsure of
himself. In the second grade Langston was introduced to
books and soon became fascinated with them and found it
as an escape from his world into the wonderful world inside
of them. At the age of thirteen Hughes went to live with his
mother in Lincoln, Illinois and then Cleveland, Ohio where
he went to high school. It was in Lincoln that Hughes wrote
his first poem after being elected class poet by his fellow
classmates. Hughes, the only black at his school, said that
the only reason that he was elected was that his peers felt
that he must have a good sense