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Photo courtesy the Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, Library of Congress
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Photo courtesy the Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, Library of Congress
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Photo courtesy Archive.org
John Mercer Langston, the first African-American from Virginia to win election to Congress, found himself at the edge of a historical tide. Overcoming obstruction of black voters, he served six months in the House of Representatives and spent part of that time defending his election to the seat. He is among 10 people selected for recognition on a planned Brown’s Island monument honoring African-Americans who fought against slavery and, in its aftermath, for civil rights. The state’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Commission is overseeing the memorial, which will be installed by 2019.
Langston, a Louisa County native, was born free on Dec. 14, 1829, to a white plantation owner and his former slave, a woman of African and American Indian heritage. While attending Ohio’s Oberlin College, he married Caroline Matilda Wall, and they had three sons and two daughters, one of whom died in childhood. His grandnephew was Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance poet.
He rose through the pre-Civil War abolitionist movement and the Reconstruction Freedmen’s Bureau, founded the law school at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and later became the university’s president. Afterward, he was named consul general to Haiti, and Virginia’s Board of Education in 1885 appointed Langston to head the new Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (later Virginia State University) near Petersburg.
Langston’s public life coincided with the rise of Virginia’s Readjuster Party, one of the most successful third parties ever to hold power in the country. The party initiated a “readjustment” of the state’s pre-Civil War public debt — advocating a slower rate of repayment at a lower rate of interest. Virginia could then pay for improvements to public education and infrastructure.
Headed by former Confederate general and railroad magnate William Mahone, the party encouraged African-Americans to vote and placed blacks in political patronage jobs. Virginia’s parties fractured at the rise of Readjusters, but in the end, white supremacists stole almost all their advances. Mahone is puzzling, says Lynchburg College professor Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego, author of “The Risen Phoenix: Black Politics in the Post-Civil War South.” He adds, “Here’s a man who, at the Battle of the Crater, is part of the slaughter of the United States Colored Troops trapped in the hole, and then, a few years later, he’s calling on Langston to lead Virginia Normal, and he’s engaged in a third party that seeks cross-racial fusion voting.”
The Readjuster period came to a bloody end when a street scuffle in Danville led to the gun deaths of five people on Nov. 3, 1883, the day before statewide elections. Democrats and Republicans blamed the Readjusters for emboldening blacks to reject deference to whites. The reorganized and energized Democrats, who sought to reclaim white dominance, chased the party from office. Mahone went Republican, joining what was seen as the party of Abraham Lincoln, the enemy camp.
Langston then chose to enter the political fray. In 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prevented racial discrimination in hotels, trains and other public places. “That seems to signal to Langston that he needs to seek public office,” says Dinnella-Borrego. Black Republicans in the 4th District, a region that embraced Petersburg and a dozen Southern Virginia counties, urged Langston to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1888 election. Mahone, the Republican state chairman, balked and persuaded Frederick Douglass to write a letter opposing Langston, an earlier ally. “Langston favors black emigration from the South,” says Dinnella-Borrego. “Douglass is not a fan of blacks leaving the South. Douglass makes unkind comments about Langston’s son, Frank, [who was] charged with murder and acquitted.”
Still, “the black community doesn’t listen to Douglass and even castigates him,” Dinnella-Borrego says. He attributes Mahone’s hostility toward Langston’s candidacy to the former Confederate not wanting to exacerbate district tensions — and, perhaps, Mahone feared a dimming of his own influence. He supported Richard W. Arnold, a white Republican, in a three-way race.
Langston, who ran as an independent Republican, held an advantage that other black candidates in Virginia did not: a war chest. He inherited money from his father, who’d made substantial railroad investments. Langston hired poll monitors who witnessed voters divided into black and white lines in some Petersburg wards, an effort to stall black voters. Langston’s 12,657 votes trounced Arnold’s 3,027, but Democrat Edward C. Venable won with 13,298 votes. Langston didn’t surrender. When the 51st Congress gathered, he presented solid evidence of fraud and corruption. The House of Representatives voted on Sept. 23, 1890, to send Venable packing and seated Langston.
He served until March 3, 1891. Langston spoke in the House on Jan. 16, 1891, in favor of Massachusetts Republican Henry Cabot Lodge’s Federal Elections Bill, intended to ensure fair treatment of blacks in Southern elections. The bill fell to political horse-trading and Northern weariness over sorting out Southern political issues.
Once his term was up, Langston retired from public office but continued lawyering and speaking out on rights issues until his 1897 death, though sometimes with mixed messages. When activist Ida B. Wells spoke in England about lynching, Langston criticized her tactics. “He wasn’t perfect,” Dinnella-Borrego says. “Perhaps he was playing the pragmatist ... or maybe he didn’t want black women engaging in these issues.”
After moving back to Washington, Langston wrote an 1894 autobiography, “From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol.” Using the third person, he summarized the 1888 campaign this way: “If one considers its personnel, the peculiar division of parties, the issues presented to the people, the mode of its conduct, the manner in which Mr. Langston was treated both by the Democratic Party and an intelligent, active and powerful faction of the Republican, and its final results, closing in his complete vindication upon popular verdict and vote, [it] must stand among the most remarkable and memorable known in American political history.”
