John Mercer Langston

John Mercer Langston was born free on the fourteenth of December, 1829, in Louisa County, Virginia. He was the youngest child of Lucy Jane Langston, a freedwoman of African and Native American descent, and Ralph Quarles, a white planter who had emancipated Lucy in 1806, more than two decades before John's birth. Orphaned in 1834 when both parents died, the boy was sent to Ohio, where he was raised in freedom and educated in the North.

At Oberlin College he earned a bachelor's degree in 1849 and a master's in theology in 1852. Barred from law schools because of his race, he read law under the abolitionist attorney Philemon Bliss and, in 1854, was admitted to the Ohio bar — among the first African Americans to practice law in the United States. In 1855 the town of Brownhelm, Ohio, elected him its clerk, making him one of the first Black Americans elected to public office.

His labors widened across a lifetime of service. He recruited Black soldiers during the Civil War, became the founding dean of the Howard University School of Law, and helped shape the Civil Rights Act of 1875. He served as United States Minister to Haiti and as the first president of what is now Virginia State University. In 1888 he stood for Congress from Virginia; after a contested two-year fight over the returns, he was seated in 1890 as the first African American to represent Virginia in the House of Representatives.

He died on the fifteenth of November, 1897, in Washington, D.C. May the memory of John Mercer Langston, who opened doors that others might walk through them, be forever honored.