John Mercer Langston

John Mercer Langston (December 14, 1829 – November 15, 1897) was an 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, a historically black college.

Born a free black in Virginia to a former slave mother of mixed-race and an English planter father, in 1888 Langston was elected to the U.S. Congress as the first representative of color from Virginia. The first Black Congressman, Joseph Hayne Rainey of 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 only five African Americans elected to Congress from the South before the former Confederate states passed constitutions and electoral rules that essentially eliminated the black vote. 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 constitutional rights. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the gerrymandered district lines that southern Democratic State legislatures had drawn to keep blacks from voting.

Langston's early career was based in Ohio where, with his brother Charles, he began his lifelong work for African-American freedom, education, equal rights and suffrage. In 1855 he was one of the first African-American people in the United States elected to public office when elected as a town clerk in Ohio. He was the younger brother of Charles Henry Langston, a fellow abolitionist; they were great-uncles of the renowned poet Langston Hughes.