John Mercer Langston

John Mercer Langston was born in Louisa County, Virginia, on the fourteenth of December 1829, the son of a wealthy white planter and an enslaved woman of African and Native American descent. His father manumitted his mother and the children in his will and bequeathed the family the estate that allowed Langston's education at Oberlin College, where he earned both an undergraduate degree (1849) and a master's degree (1853).

He was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1854 — the first African American admitted to the bar in any U.S. state. He served as town clerk of Brownhelm, Ohio, in 1855 — also the first African American to hold elected office in the United States.

He was the founding dean of the Howard University School of Law (1869-76), served as U.S. Minister and Consul-General to Haiti and Chargé d'Affaires to the Dominican Republic (1877-85), and was president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute — now Virginia State University — from 1885 to 1887.

In 1888 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives from Virginia's 4th congressional district — the first African American to represent Virginia in Congress, and the only one to do so for the next one hundred and four years (until Robert C. Scott in 1993). He served the single term to which he was elected.

He died in Washington, D.C., on the fifteenth of November 1897, age sixty-seven. His great-nephew, the poet Langston Hughes — also placed in this archive — was named after him.

He is honored here as the first African American lawyer, the first to hold elected office, and a founder of American legal education.