Mary Langston
*Mary Patterson Leary Langston's birth is celebrated on this date in 1835. She was a Black educator and abolitionist.
Born Mary Sampson Patterson in North Carolina, she was the daughter of a formerly enslaved man who highly valued education; for this reason, he brought his family to Oberlin, Ohio, to secure a college education for his children. While there, she met and married abolitionist Sheridan Lewis Leary in 1859. While Mary was pregnant with her first daughter, Louisa, Sheridan Leary left to join abolitionist John Brown in the Harper's Ferry raid of 1859, where he was shot and killed.
Sheridan and Mary socialized in anti-slavery groups, including other abolitionists like Charles Langston. Leary and Langston also took part in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue in 1858, during which Charles was convicted of breaking the Fugitive Slave Act. She enrolled in Oberlin College and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1862. In 1869, she married again to the Ohio abolitionist Charles Henry Langston.
The family moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where they remained for the rest of their lives. Mary Langston was a proud woman who advocated and supported anti-slavery causes with her husbands. In 1872, Charles and Mary's daughter, Caroline Mercer Langston, was born. Mary raised her daughter Caroline's son, who became the Harlem Renaissance author Langston Hughes. She cared for her grandson until her death in 1915. Hughes remembered his grandmother as an accomplished woman who enjoyed telling him about their great ancestors.
