John Mercer Langston (December 14, 1829 – November 15, 1897) was an American abolitionist and U.S. Congressman from Virginia. He was one of the first black people in the United States elected to public office when in 1855 he was elected as a town clerk in Ohio.
Langston was born in Louisa County, Virginia, the son of Ralph Quarles, a white plantation owner, and Lucy Langston, emancipated by her husband, of mixed African and Native American background. After his parents died when Langston was five, he and his brothers, one of whom was named Charles Henry Langston, moved to Oberlin, Ohio, to live with family friends. He enrolled in Oberlin College at the age of fourteen and earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the institution. Denied admission into law school, most likely because of his race, Langston then studied law under attorney and Republican congressman Philemon Bliss and was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1854.
He became actively involved in the Abolitionism movement, organizing antislavery societies locally and at the state level. He helped runaway slaves to escape to the North along the Ohio part of the Underground Railroad. He was a founding member and president of the National Equal Rights League, which fought for black voting rights.
During the Civil War, Langston recruited African Americans to fight for the Union Army, enlisting hundreds of men for duty in the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth regiments and for Ohio’s 1st black regiment. After the war, he was appointed inspector general for the Freedmen's Bureau, a Federal organization that assisted freed slaves.
Langston moved to Washington, D.C., in 1868 to establish and serve as dean of Howard University's law school;the first black law school in the country. He was appointed acting president of the school in 1872, and he was the vice president of the school as well. He was rejected as president of Howard Law School by a committee who refused to disclose the reason, but it was probably because of his race and integration ideas. He was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant a member of the board of health of the District of Columbia, and was elected its secretary in 1875. In 1877 Langston left to become U.S. Minister to Haiti; he also served as chargé d'affaires to the Dominican Republic starting in 1884. He returned to Virginia in 1885 and was named the first president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (now Virginia State University).
In 1888, urged by fellow Republicans, black and white, he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican. He lost to his Democratic opponent, but contested the results of the election. After an 18-month fight, he was declared the winner and given the seat in Congress. He served for the remaining six months of the term, and then lost his bid for reelection. Langston was the first black person elected to Congress from Virginia, and he was the only one for another century.
Oklahoma's Langston University is named in his honor, as is the John Mercer Langston Bar Association in Columbus, Ohio, Langston Middle School in Oberlin, Ohio, the former John Mercer Langston High School in Danville, Virginia, and John M. Langston High School Continuation Program in Arlington, Virginia. He was a member of the board of trustees of Saint Paul's College in Lawrenceville, Virginia , founded in 1888 as the St Paul Normal and Industrial School, and incorporated by the General Assembly on March 4, 1890. His house in Oberlin is a National Historic Landmark.
Langston was the great-uncle of poet Langston Hughes.[1]
See also
References
- Langston, John Mercer. From the Virginia plantation to the National Capitol : or, The first and only Negro representative in Congress from the Old Dominion. 1894; New York: Kraus Reprint, 1969.
- Langston, John Mercer. Freedom and Citizenship: Selected Lectures of Hon. John Mercer Langston. Washington D.C.: William H.Darby Publishers 1883; Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing Company, 2007.
- Cheek, William Francis and Aimee Lee. John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
References
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