John Mercer Langston

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John Mercer Langston, (born Dec. 14, 1829, Louisa county, Va., U.S.—died Nov. 15, 1897, Washington, D.C.), black leader, educator, and diplomat, who is believed to have been the first black ever elected to public office in the United States.



The son of a Virginia planter and a slave mother, Langston was emancipated at the age of five, attended school in Ohio, and graduated from Oberlin College in 1849. He quickly became a leader among free blacks and was elected to local offices in Brownhelm Township, Ohio (1855), and Oberlin (1865–67). In 1864 he helped organize the National Equal Rights League, of which he was the first president.



After the American Civil War Langston moved to Washington, D.C., practiced law, and was professor of law and dean of the law department (1869–77) and vice president (1872–76) of Howard University. He was U.S. minister to Haiti and chargé d’affaires to Santo Domingo (1877–85) and was elected president of the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (1885). In 1888 he was a Republican candidate from Virginia for the U.S. House of Representatives, and, after a challenge of the election returns that took almost two years, he succeeded in unseating his Democratic opponent and served in Congress from Sept. 23, 1890, to March 3, 1891.


An African American, he became 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, a historically black college.



Born free in Virginia to a freedwoman of mixed race and a white planter father, in 1888 Langston was elected to the U.S. Congress as 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 nineteenth 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 to enforce 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.