John Mercer Langston is born free in Louisa County. He is the son a White planter and his free Black mistress. She was of mixed African and American Indian ancestry.
One of the most prominent African Americans in the United States before and during the Civil War, John Mercer Langston is the first known Black man elected to an office in the United States. He was an abolitionist, attorney, educator, activist, diplomat, and politician. Langston was born free on December 14, 1829 in Louisa County Virginia, the youngest of four children. His father, Ralph Quarles, was a wealthy White planter and slaveholder. Langston's mother, Lucy Langston, was an emancipated slave of Indian and Black ancestry. Their three sons were born free, because their mother was free. Both parents died in 1834, when John Langston, the youngest child, was four years old. The parents left the children a fairly large inheritance.
In 1840, John Langston’s brother Gideon brought him to live in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he went to school and was exposed to some of the strongest antislavery rhetoric in the North. A year later, he experienced several days of sustained White violence against Black communities in the city. Following the example set by his older brothers and their colleagues, who were among the first Black graduates of Oberlin College in Ohio, Langston also attended school in Ohio, completed his studies and graduated from Oberlin College in 1849, becoming the fifth African American male to graduate from Oberlin’s Collegiate Department. After he earned his bachelor's degree in 1849 he also got a master's degree in theology in 1852.
Langston wanted to become a lawyer, because it was a profession where only three Black men in the nation had officially achieved nationwide in the early 1850s. But he was rejected from schools in New York. He was frank in disclosing that he was of African ancestry. Upon his rejection, it was strongly intimated to him that if he were to claim other than African blood, he would have been admitted. After law schools denied him admission, he studied law through an apprenticeship with Congressman Philemon Bliss, who would later be appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court of Dakota Territory by President Abraham Lincoln. In 1854, he married Caroline Wall, also a former student at Oberlin, who was active in the abolitionist movement.
He was one of the first Black men to become a lawyer when he was admitted and passed the bar in Ohio in 1854. This was ten years after Macon Bolling Allen, became the first African American lawyer. By the early 1850s, Langston had entered politics, and at one point allied with the Free Democrats, antislavery activists previously affiliated with the Free Soil Party. In 1855, he relocated to Brownhelm, Ohio and ran for public office. He was elected township clerk of Brownhelm on the Liberty ticket, thereby becoming the first known African American elected to an office in the United States. Following his victory, Langston wrote a letter to Frederick Douglass to tell him the news, which Douglass published in his newspaper, Frederick Douglass’ Paper.
He became an active member of the North American 19th-century Black activist movement early in his life. Langston assisted Black Americans who had been successful freedom seekers. John and his wife Caroline became active in the abolitionist movement. He helped runaway slaves to escape to the North along the Ohio part of the Underground Railroad. In 1858 he and his brother Charles partnered in leading the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. John was acting as president and traveling to organize local units, and Charles managing as executive secretary in Cleveland. John also played a big part in the famous Oberlin–Wellington Rescue of 1858, where Oberlin residents helped a runaway slave escape from his slave catcher, and took him to freedom in Canada.
John Mercer Langston caught the attention of Frederick Douglass, who encouraged him to deliver antislavery speeches. In 1863, when the government approved founding of the United States Colored Troops, Langston was appointed to recruit African Americans to fight for the Union Army. He was responsible for the formation of the 127th Colored Ohio Volunteer infantry and recruited for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiment during the Civil War. He unsuccessfully pursued a commission as a colonel in the U.S. Army in the final year of the war. In 1864, Langston chaired the committee whose agenda was ratified by the Black National Convention. Their agenda called for abolition of slavery, support of racial unity and self-help, and equality before the law.
Shortly after the convention, along with minister Henry Highland Garnet, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and other civil rights activists, they found the National Equal Rights League in 1864 and elected Langston president. NERL was one of the earliest organizations dedicated to civil rights. The organization called for full and immediate citizenship for African Americans based on the sacrifices they made on the battlefield during the Civil War. They also believed that African-American men deserved the right to vote. After founding the national organization, state branches developed in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Louisiana, Ohio, Missouri, Michigan, and Massachusetts. Langston also advocated for the NERL’s platform, bringing it specifically to the President.
During this time John Mercer Langston served as president of the Richmond Land and Finance Association. The goal of this organization was the purchase and sell land to Black Americans. In 1867, U.S Army General Oliver Otis Howard, Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau and founder and the first President of Howard University appointed Langston inspector general for the Freedmen's Bureau. Created in 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau was a Federal organization that tried to oversee labor contracts in the former Confederate states during the Reconstruction era. The Bureau also ran a bank, provided food, clothing, and shelter for displaced Southerners, including African Americans, and assisted in establishing schools for freedmen and their children.
In 1867, Langston served as general inspector of schools for the Freedmen’s Bureau, touring the postwar South and encouraging formerly enslaved men and women to seek educational opportunities. He regularly spoke out against segregated facilities, including churches, and worked with Republican Party officials to mobilize Black voters in the South. He gave speeches, encouraged Black candidates to run for office, and organized chapters of the Union League throughout the region. For the first two decades of the postwar era, Langston held prominent political and educational appointments. By 1868, Langston was living in Washington D.C. and helping to establish Howard University's law school.
In 1870, Howard University appointed John Mercer Langston as head of its law department. During his tenure at Howard University, Langston served as dean of the law department and later as vice president and acting president from December 1873 to June 1875. Langston resigned from Howard when the board of trustees failed to offer him a full term as president. On March 15, 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Langston as a member of the Board of Health for Washington, D.C. Langston was one of the first Black Americans to serve in such a position within the United States government.
During 1870, Langston assisted Republican Senator Charles Sumner from Massachusetts with drafting the civil rights bill that was enacted as the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Langston’s draft prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and in schools. The final bill stripped the anti-discrimination protection for schools. Grant and subsequent presidents did not enforce the law and the U.S. Supreme Court later gutted it, holding that the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution did not apply to public accommodations. The 43rd Congress of the United States passed the bill in February 1875 and it was signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1875. Langston’s respected work created a positive reputation, leading to a series of presidential appointments.
In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Langston to serve as U.S. Minister to Haiti, a position that he held for eight years when Democratic President Grover Cleveland began his first term in office. After his diplomatic service, in 1885 Langston returned to the U.S and Virginia. He was appointed by the state legislature as the first President of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (now Virginia State University). In 1888, Langston was urged to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives by fellow Republicans, both Black and White as an Independent Republican candidate. He represented the “Black Belt of Virginia,” a region where African Americans were 65 percent of the population.
Langston began an energetic campaign for the Republican nomination, lobbying Black and White delegates to the district convention. The race caused bitter division between both racial and party lines and Frederick Douglass fiercely opposed Langston's candidacy. Due to voting irregularities, the final results of the election were contested during a two-year court battle. Separate lines at the polls meant Black voters had to wait as long as three hours to vote and many ballots were reported missing. In 1890, John Langston was declared winner and held Virginia’s Fourth District seat. He served the seven remaining months of the Congress. Langston was the first Black person elected to Congress from Virginia, and he would be the last for another century.
While a member of Congress, Langston was appointed to the Committee on Education. He advocated for greater protection of African-American voting rights, a national industrial university to teach African Americans labor skills. He also fought for the appointment of Black candidates to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. Langston also submitted bills to establish a national industrial university for Black students. Unfortunately, his efforts did not gain traction in Congress, as did his bill to observe the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. Langston rejected calls for Black Americans to emigrate abroad, reminding the House of the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.
With the end of the 51st Congress, Langston returned to Petersburg, Virginia. In 1892, Republicans in his Virginia district asked him to run again, but he refused. John Mercer Langston continued to be active in politics, often speaking publicly about the achievements of Black Americans. Promised a federal judicial appointment as well as several U.S. Department of Treasury patronage positions Langston began campaigning for President Benjamin Harrison’s re-election in 1892. However, when the administration withdrew the promised positions, he backed rival Republican James G. Blaine’s quest for the nomination.
Langston spent the remainder of his life traveling and working on his autobiography, "From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol", which was published in 1894. In a period of increasing disenfranchisement of Blacks in the South, he was one of five African Americans elected to Congress during the Jim Crow era of the last decade of the 19th century. On November 15, 1897, three years after his retirement, Langston died in Washington, D.C. Partly because of his prominence, the Oklahoma Territory town of Langston, was named after him in 1890. In 1941, the historically Black college in the same town, founded in 1897 as the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University, was renamed Langston University in honor of John Mercer Langston. John Mercer Langston was the great-uncle of the poet James Mercer Langston Hughes, better known as Langston Hughes.
One of the most prominent African Americans in the United States before, during and after the Civil War.
Here is timeline summary of John Mercer Langston.
John Mercer Langston is born free in Louisa County. He is the son a White planter and his free Black mistress. She was of mixed African and American Indian ancestry.
John Mercer Langston graduates with a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College.
John Mercer Langston graduates with a master's degree from Oberlin College.
John Mercer Langston is admitted to the Ohio bar.
October 25
John Mercer Langston and Caroline Matilda Wall marry, in Oberlin, Ohio. They will have three sons and two daughters.
John Mercer Langston wins election as clerk of the township of Brownhelm, Ohio, making him one of the first African Americans to hold elective office in Ohio.
John Mercer Langston registers for the draft and seeks an officer's commission, but the Civil War ends before he receives one.
May
John Mercer Langston joins the Freedmen's Bureau as an agent observing schools in Virginia.
June 17
John Mercer Langston becomes the Freedmen's Bureau's general inspector of schools.
Howard University, in Washington, D.C., appoints John Mercer Langston as a law professor.
When the law department opens on January 6th, John Mercer Langston is head of the law department at Howard University, in Washington, D.C.
Howard University, in Washington, D.C., appoints John Mercer Langston dean of its law school.
President Ulysses S. Grant appoints John Mercer Langston a member of the Board of Health for the District of Columbia.
John Mercer Langston serves as vice president and acting president of Howard University, in Washington, D.C. from December 1873 to July 1875
Howard University, in Washington, D.C., awards John Mercer Langston an honorary LLD.
In the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes, John Mercer Langston serves as minister resident and consul general to Haiti
John Mercer Langston publishes a collection of his speeches entitled Freedom and Citizenship.
Virginia's State Board of Education appoints John Mercer Langston president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (later Virginia State University)
December 6th
The board of visitors for Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute elects James H. Johnston to succeed John Mercer Langston as president.
January 2nd
John Mercer Langston attends a Republican Party conference in Farmville, where he is urged to run for Congress. He does not win the party's nomination but decides to run as an independent Republican.
November
Edward C. Venable, a Democrat, defeats John Mercer Langston, an independent Republican, in the race for Congress.
John Mercer Langston presents evidence to Congress that his election loss was the result of fraud.
September 23 - March 3
John Mercer Langston serves 6 months as Virginia's first African American congressman.
September 23
The House of Representatives votes to unseat Edward C. Venable and seat John Mercer Langston, citing election fraud.
November
James F. Epes, a Democrat, defeats John Mercer Langston, a Republican, for a seat in the House of Representatives.
John Mercer Langston speaks in the House of Representatives in support of the so-called Force Bill, which would supervise elections to guarantee Blacks fair treatment.
A toolkit of essential widgets The Republican Party nominates John Mercer Langston for Congress but he declines to run.
From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol, a memoir by John Mercer Langston, is published.
Langston continued to practice law and speak out on issues of race and political equality until he died at his Washington home on November 15th.