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Letter to F. Coleman Rosenberger, October 21, 1948, Accession #8870-i , Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.
This collection was purchased by the Library from Gallery of History, Las Vegas, Nevada, on June 2, 1997.
Langston Hughes, New York City, writes to F. Coleman Rosenberger, Alexandria, Virginia, on October 21, 1948. He expresses his interest in Rosenberger's book Virginia Reader , especially because Anne Spencer is included in the table of contents. Hughes also furnishes information on his Virginia family connections, "My own grandparents on my mother's side came from Louisa County, Virginia -- that is, my grandfather, Charles Langston, and grand-uncle, John Mercer Langston (1829-1897), who was a reconstruction congressman and published a book which I have called, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol , as well as a volume of his speeches under the title, Freedom and Citizenship , brought out when he was U.S. Minister Resident of Haiti. He was also the first president, I believe, of the Virginia State College for Negroes at Petersburg. Both he and my grandfather were sons of a white planter by a slave woman, and in the course of my travels in recent years I have come across one or two relatives 'on the white side.'"