Langston Hughes Just Got a Year Older

Regarding the article's assertion that "early newspapers had a lot of typos": while that may be true, the mis-spelling of "Mrs. C.M. Hugnes and son" in the cited article from 1902 is actually not an original typo at all, but a much more recent artifact of faulty optical character recognition as performed on the microfilm (or other medium) that the original newspaper article was archived on. Optical character readers are a very fast and efficient way of translating physical or photographic text into searchable digital text - their drawback is that they sometimes don't catch the very thin portions of lower-case letters printed above or below the main part of the character (so-called "ascenders" and "descenders"), especially when scanning older, faded newsprint, or when reading files that have been digitized at too low a resolution. Thus printed g's are sometimes rendered digitally as o's, j's as i's, and, yes, h's as n's. Give the editors and typesetters at the old Topeka Plaindealer a break - they got it right! Meanwhile, the moral for web archaeologists is: when searching online for old newspaper references to "Langston Hughes," don't forget to include "Lanoston Huones"...

Very interesting article but seems like a stretch to ascribe the wrong birth date to a particularly African American trait or tradition. Examples abound of people of all nationalities from earlier generations not knowing their exact birth dates for reasons of poor record keeping, or lost records. And how many people shave a few years off their age as life goes on to simply ward off older age?

Today we are so used to filling out forms with date of birth, mother's maiden name, SSN, etc. This wasn't done in previous generations - my father, who came from an affluent white family, couldn't remember if he was born in 1915 or 1916. My Irish immigrant ancestors give different ages in every census record, and one date of birth often appears on their naturalization records and another on their gravestones. But I'm charmed by the way 19th century newspapers recorded the most mundane events in their social pages. I know this was true of papers for whites - I'm delighted to learn from this article that this was true of papers for the black community as well. It was a smaller world then.

Gracie Allen, Doris Day and Gary Hart, to name a few, misrepresented their age. It is not an African-American idiosyncrasy.

Trying to associate an error in his birth year with the African:American tradition of improvisation is just another example of the way academics tie bogus jargon to what are essentially clerical errors. Are they that starved for recognition?

I've loved reading Hughes' poetry since I was a young girl. I have a recording on a CD of him reading his "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". Fabulous. It is surprising that in the last few months I've read 3 different newly published articles about him or his life. As a teacher I have introduced hundreds of young children to his work. Finding even this small new piece of information is thrilling.

During Jim Crow, for Black parents to get a birth certificate for their child, both had to show up at the county clerk's office on the designated "Negro Day" once a month. They had to bring their marriage license and a notarized document from a doctor who witnessed the birth.

Timely and important to my manuscript. I have a chapter about folklorists and blues origins in which Langston Hughes and Zora Hurston feature prominantly—Even though they were both funded by primitivists which may have compromised their early work. There is much about these two extrodianry figures that have been revealed recently. I found their personal letters facinating. Also, Kevin Young is a poet everyone read.

"Even if the change in Hughes’s birth year came from his mother, 'such reinvention does connect with other kinds of black improvisation,' Mr. Young said." Surely Hughes's shifting birth date also taps into the historical instability, if not actual erasure, of birth dates of enslaved Afrodescended persons. Here is Frederick Douglass: "I was born in Tuckahoe, [...] Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday." Even if Prof. Rampersad believes the find doesn't 'upend' our understanding of Hughes (and I guess it doesn't), this is still a thrilling discovery! I'm not surprised Mr. Henry couldn't sleep that first night. Such find is what researchers and scholars dream of.

One of my first projects as an elementary school student in Columbia, Missouri was about great Missourians. I decided that Langston Hughes was who I wanted to dress up and educate my fellow students about. Very interesting to read this article so many years later.

It can be difficult to figure out how much importance to give something like an incorrect birth year. Apparently some parents of child prodigy performers at least in the 19th century gave later birth years for their children to make their feats seem even more miraculous, increasing the income they brought in. There are important cases, such as Lawrence Gushee's discovery that Jelly Roll Morton was born in 1890, not 1885, making his claims for when he "invented Jazz" highly improbable. And a number of years ago a scholar discovered that ragtime and show-tune composer Eubie Blake was born in 1887, not 1883, meaning that as a late-in-life celebrity he was not actually a centenarian (a distinction that means little to me, he was still terrific). Another scholar posted online the suggestion that he made the switch in order to get Social Security benefits earlier. I pointed out that the 1883 birth year was given as early as a 1927 reference work, prior to the existence of Social Security. So sometimes dishonest motives are imagined where there is simple error on someone's part. Each case is different, and of differing significance.