Groundsite Image Gallery
Lawrence City Library (detail)
Artist: Hughes, Langston
Height: 0.000"
Width: 0.000"
Lawrence City Library, 200 West Ninth St. (1904)
This plaque, dedicated on the 100th anniversary of Langston Hughes’s birth, is at the west entrance of the Carnegie building, once the City Library.
When Hughes lived with his mother in Topeka, they went to the library located on the Capitol grounds. He remembered, before six, appreciating the security and permanence of a library room (Big Sea 26).
Hughes does not mention the Lawrence library in particular. He wrote that he read "all of my mother’s novels from the library" (Big Sea 26), although she then lived in Kansas City. The Hughes family apparently used library services throughout Hughes’s childhood.