Emma Langdon Roche
American writer and artist
Emma Langdon Roche (March 26, 1878 – April 5, 1945) was an American writer and artist, best known for her work Historic Sketches of The South (1914).
She was the first writer to publish a book based on interviews with Cudjoe Lewis, also known as Kossola, a survivor of the Middle Passage. He was a captive on the last known slave ship, Clotilda, which a group of Americans used to illegally import slaves to Alabama in 1860 from present-day Benin, decades after the 1807 prohibition of the Atlantic trade. Her book included an original photograph of Lewis and his wife, as well as her drawings of him and other of the survivors.
Background
Emma Langdon Roche was born in 1878 in Mobile, Alabama as the third of four surviving children of Thomas T. and Annie Laura (James) Roche. Her father was born in Ireland and had been brought to the US at the age of two in 1845 by his immigrant parents, to escape the Great Famine. He became a funeral director in Mobile. Her mother was born in Alabama, where her parents had moved from Virginia. (Emma's maternal grandmother was born in Vermont.)
Emma had three surviving brothers, Edward J. (born 1872, who also became a funeral director), Frank L. (born 1875) and the younger Thomas Sheppard Roche (born 1883). Two other children had died young.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american writer and artist. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q59743116. VIAF identifies the subject as 2096997. The Library of Congress control number is no99021885. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1878, 1945, 1914 and 1860.
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This entry incorporates text from “Emma Langdon Roche” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.