Portrait of John Mercer Langston
Title/Subject: John Mercer Langston (American, 1829-1897)
Artist: Ivy-Jane Edmondson Starr (American, 1909-2011)
Date: 1985
Type: painting
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 28.3" h x 26" w
Collection: Paintings, Prints, Drawings and other Framed Items (RG 40)
John Mercer Langston (1829–1897) received the A.B. from Oberlin Collegiate Institute (Oberlin College) in 1849 and the A.M. from Oberlin Theological Seminary in 1853. He was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1854. At the age of twenty-five, Langston became the first black American to hold elective office in the United States when in 1855 all-white voters elected him Brownhelm township clerk (located west of Oberlin). A proponent of racial equality, he was a role model for black students who attended Oberlin during the mid-to late nineteenth century.During the Civil War, Langston recruited black volunteers in the Midwest for the Union cause; he assembled the Massachusetts 54th and other regiments. In 1867, Langston served as Inspector General of the Freedmen's Bureau, touring the postwar South and encouraging freedmen to seek educational opportunities. In 1868, he returned to Washington, DC, where he established the law department at Howard University, a new college founded to educate African Americans. In the early 1870s, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts sought Langston's aid in drafting his Civil Rights Bill. In 1871, Langston received an appointment from President Ulysses S. Grant (for whom he had campaigned in 1868) to the District of Columbia Board of Health. Langston served as Howard University's dean from 1868 to 1875 and from 1874 to 1875 as vice president and acting president of Howard.
Langston’s distinguished career included his appointment, by President Rutherford B. Hayes, as resident minister to Haiti and chargé d'affaires in Santo Domingo. After settling in Virginia, and in spite of fierce opposition from Democrats, he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1890 for a brief term. He returned to Petersburg, Virginia, at the end of the 51st Congress. For the remainder of his life he traveled between Petersburg and Washington, and worked on his autobiography, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol, published in 1894. He was the great-uncle of the poet Langston Hughes.
John Mercer Langston's portrait was painted by the artist Ivy-Jane Edmondson Starr, mother of Oberlin College President S. Frederick Starr, in 1985. She worked from a daguerreotype of Langston in the College Archives made at the time of his graduation from the Oberlin Theological Seminary in 1853. Starr's portrait of Langston is installed in the College's Cox Administration Building.
Sources
Roland M. Baumann, Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College: A Documentary History
(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2010).
Langston, John Mercer, History, Art and Archives, United States House of Representatives (accessed 8/29/2020).
Related Collections
Records of Graduates and Former Students (RG 28)
Photographs: Graduates and Former Students (RG 32/3)
Oberlin College Historic Portraits (digital collection)
Oberlin and the Civil War (digital collection)
The Oberlin Sanctuary Project (digital exhibit)