Born free in Virginia to a white plantation owner and a formerly enslaved mother, John Mercer Langston was orphaned young and raised in Ohio, where he graduated from Oberlin College at 20. Denied admission to law school because of his race, he studied privately with a local judge and passed the Ohio bar in 1854 — the state's first Black lawyer.
In 1855 he became one of the first Black Americans elected to public office in the country, as Brownhelm Township clerk. He recruited Black soldiers for the Union Army, then in 1868 organised the law department at the newly founded Howard University, serving as its first dean and later as the university's acting president.
He was later U.S. minister to Haiti and, in 1890, became the first Black congressman to represent Virginia, co-drafting legislative language that would become the model for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
- First Black lawyer admitted to the Ohio bar
- Among the first African Americans elected to public office in the U.S.
- Founding dean of Howard University's law department
- First Black congressman to represent Virginia
- Turn a denial of entry into the founding of your own institution.. Denied law school admission, he later founded Howard University's law department.
- Local office is still office — start wherever the first door opens.. He began as an elected township clerk before reaching Congress.
- Draft the language today that another generation will need tomorrow.. His legislative work prefigured the Civil Rights Act of 1964.