What Brought Our Ancestors to America?

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. Langston's 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 Harper's 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