John Mercer Langston
(December 14, 1829 – November 15, 1897)
abolitionist, attorney, educator, activist, diplomat, and politician
Synopsis
He was the founding dean of the law school at Howard University and helped create the department. He was the first president of what is now Virginia State University, a historically black college. He was elected a U.S. Representative from Virginia and wrote From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol; Or, the First and Only Negro Representative in Congress From the Old Dominion.
Born free in Virginia to a freedwoman of mixed ethnicity and a white English immigrant planter, in 1888 Langston was elected to the U.S. Congress. He was the first Representative of color from Virginia. Joseph Hayne Rainey, the black Republican congressman from South Carolina, had been elected in 1870 during the Reconstruction era.
In the Jim Crow era of the later 19th century, Langston was one of five African Americans elected to Congress from the South before the former Confederate states passed constitutions and electoral rules from 1890 to 1908 that essentially disenfranchised blacks, excluding them from politics. After that, no African Americans would be elected from the South until 1973, after the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed authorizing the enforcement of their constitutional franchise rights.
Langston’s early career was based in Ohio where, with his older brother Charles Henry Langston, he began his lifelong work for African-American freedom, education, equal rights and suffrage. In 1855 he was one of the first African Americans in the United States elected to public office when elected as a town clerk in Ohio. The brothers were the grandfather and great-uncle, respectively, of the renowned poet Langston Hughes
BIO
He was an African – American abolitionist, attorney, educator, activist, and politician. He was the first dean of the law school at Howard University and helped create the department. He was the first president of what is now Virginia State University. Together with his older brothers Gideon and Charles, John Langston 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 Charles partnered in leading the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, with John acting as president and traveling to organize local units, and Charles managing as executive secretary in Cleveland. In 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. 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. President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Langston a member of the Board of Health of the District of Columbia. In 1877 President Rutherford Hayes appointed Langston as U.S. Minister to Haiti, he also served as Charge D’Affairs to the Dominican Republic. After his diplomatic service, in 1885 Langston returned to the US and Virginia. He was appointed by the state legislature as the first president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, a historically black college (HBCU) at Petersburg. There he also began to build a political base. In 1888, Langston was urged to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives by fellow Republicans, both black and white. Leaders of the biracial Readjuster Party, which had held political power in Virginia from 1879 to 1883, did not support his candidacy. Langston ran as a Republican and lost to his Democratic opponent. He contested the results of the election because of voter intimidation and fraud. After 18 months, the Congressional elections committee declared Langston the winner, and he took his seat in the US Congress.From 1891 until his death in 1897, he practiced law in Washington, DC.
He died at his home, Hillside Cottage at 2225 Fourth Street NW in Washington, DC, on the morning of November 15 from malaria-induced acute indigestion. After spending time at Harmony Cemetery in Maryland, and despite talk of sending him to Nashville for burial, he was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Washington, DC. The John Mercer Langston House in Oberlin, Ohio, has been designated as a National Historic Landmark. John Mercer Langston Elementary School at 33 P Street NW in Washington, DC was named in his honor. It opened in 1902 as a school for black students and remained open until 1993. In 1997 the building served as a homeless shelter, but it has mostly sat empty since closing