John Mercer Langston

John Mercer Langston (born December 14, 1829, Louisa county, Virginia, U.S.—died November 15, 1897, Washington, D.C.) was an American educator, activist, politician, and diplomat who is often credited with being the first Black person elected to public office in the United States. He was also the first Black person elected to represent Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Langston was the son of Ralph Quarles, a white plantation owner, and Lucy Langston, a formerly enslaved woman of Black and Native ancestry. Born free, Langston moved to Missouri as a child and then to Ohio, where he attended school and graduated from Oberlin College in 1849. He returned to Oberlin for a master’s degree in theology in 1852. After being denied entry to law school, he studied law independently and was admitted to the bar in Ohio in 1854, making him the first Black lawyer in the state. He quickly became a leading abolitionist and political activist.

In 1855 Langston was elected town clerk in Brownhelm Township, Ohio, believed to be the first time a Black person won an elected office in the United States. As he later recounted in his autobiography, his election meant that his “official and professional career really took its upward positive shape and character,” beginning with an invitation to address a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society later that year, where he was introduced by William Lloyd Garrison.

During the Civil War, Langston recruited Black soldiers to serve in Union regiments from Ohio and Massachusetts, including the 54th Regiment. He helped to found the National Equal Rights League in 1864, and he later served as its president. He was also a member of Oberlin’s city council from 1865 to 1867 and its department of education in 1867–68.

Langston then moved to Washington, D.C., where he practiced law. During the period 1869–77, he was professor of law at Howard University, and he helped to establish its law department. Langston was the department’s dean, and he was also Howard’s vice president and acting president from 1873 to 1875. During his time at Howard, Langston also worked with U.S. Senator Charles Sumner to write legislation that would become the Civil Rights Acts of 1875.

Langston was U.S. minister to Haiti and chargé d’affaires to Santo Domingo from 1877 to 1885. In 1885 he accepted an offer to lead the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (now Virginia State University), where he was president until 1887.

In 1888 Langston ran for election to Congress as a Republican candidate from Virginia. After a challenge of the election returns that took almost two years, he succeeded in unseating his Democratic opponent and served in the House from September 23, 1890, to March 3, 1891. He sought reelection but did not win. In a speech to Congress in January 1891, after his loss, Langston raised “the question [of] whether every American citizen may wield the ballot in this country freely and according to his own judgment” and reflected on an election that he believed was not fairly conducted:

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“Oh,” but the Democrats say, “you got beaten at the last election.” In one sense we did, and in one sense we did not. “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.” We have only been chastened a little to make us more firm, and more solid, and the more certain in the high march that is before us to the “promised land” in the midst of our own homes to which God would lead us in the establishment of an all-comprehensive freedom and equality of right.

Langston’s autobiography, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol; or, The First and Only Negro Representative in Congress from the Old Dominion, was published in 1894.