Langston Hughes have faced and suffered from many terrible hardships. Hughes's parents divorced when he was just a small child, and his father moved to Mexico. He lived in Lawrence, Kansas with his grandmother, Mary Langston, for a large amount of time. He lived there from 1903 to 1915. His grandfather, Charles H. Langston, settled in Kansas in 1862. Charles and Mary were both free blacks that were educated at Oberlin College in Ohio. Hughes's parents were Carolina Mercer Langston and James Hughes. They got married in 1899, but shortly after their son's birth, in order for James Hughes to practice law, he had to leave the United States to escape the racial prejudice that prevented him from doing so.
Langston Hughes attended first grade in Topeka where he had spent a short amount of time living with his mother. 
After, he returned back to Lawrence and then he enrolled in Pinckney School. He attended second and third grade in a segregated classroom. Lawrence schools were not segregated in fourth grade. Hughes attended fourth through sixth grades in New York School. While living with his grandmother, he wrote that he was often lonely. His grandmother was an elderly but stern woman. His grandmother was a proud woman that refused to do domestic work. She rented out rooms in her house to earn money instead. They were still poor and Mary often had times when she couldn't make the mortgage payments. In order to help out the family, Langston Hughes did odd jobs. Some of the jobs were, selling newspapers, selling maple seeds he collected to a seed company, and working at a hotel. 
In the fall of 1914, located at 9th and Kentucky Street was Central School, where he entered seventh grade. The following spring, Mary Langston died. Hughes then went on to live with James and Mary Reed at 731 New York Street. The Reeds were friends of the family and young Langston was very happy there. In the summer of 1915, he was thirteen years old, he joined Carrie in Lincoln, Illinois.