A man of many firsts

“The Con­sti­tu­tion does not pro­vide for first and sec­ond class citizens.”

— Wen­dell Willkie

“There is in this coun­try no supe­rior, dom­i­nant, rul­ing class of cit­i­zens. There is no caste here. Our Con­sti­tu­tion is color-blind, and nei­ther knows nor tol­er­ates classes among citizens.”

— Jus­tice John Mar­shall Harlan,

Plessy v. Fer­gu­son, 1896

Lucy Langston and Ralph Quar­les loved one another. Their rela­tion­ship had been going on for sev­eral years and Quar­les intended to have Lucy move in with him and expand their fam­ily. But Lucy and Ralph could not let neigh­bors know about their rela­tion­ship and they most cer­tainly could not marry.

That’s because Quar­les, the son of Euro­pean immi­grants, was a Vir­ginia plan­ta­tion owner and Langston, of mixed African Amer­i­can and Native Amer­i­can her­itage, was not only his lover but also his legal prop­erty. After the birth of their first child, a daugh­ter named Maria, Quar­les freed both Langston and their child. Their rela­tion­ship would last for decades and they would have three more chil­dren, all sons. Their last child, John, would be born in 1829 at the fam­ily farm in Lou­sia, Va.

John’s child­hood would not be with­out tragedy, how­ever. His par­ents both died when he was just four years of age. Though the family’s prop­erty was divided among the boys, none were old enough to take pos­ses­sion and John was moved to live with a fam­ily friend named William Gooch in Chill­i­cothe. Five years later, Gooch packed up to move to Mis­souri and since, as a result of the Mis­souri Com­pro­mise, the Show Me State was a slave state, the ugly face of slav­ery once again made an appear­ance in John’s young life.

Fear­ful of what the move would mean for the 10-year-old child, his half brother sued in an Ohio court and John moved again, this time with the abo­li­tion­ist who had pur­chased Gooch’s Chill­i­cothe farm. Six years later, when his older brother Gideon had attained adult­hood, John moved in with Gideon in Cincin­nati just before the race riots and “Black Laws” of the fol­low­ing year.

The chang­ing sit­u­a­tion in Cincin­nati would lead to John, now 14, mov­ing back to Chill­i­cothe with his half brother. There he was exposed to sev­eral older sib­lings and their friends who were all grad­u­ates of the recently founded Ober­lin Col­lege. They inspired John to attend and he grad­u­ated in 1849, obtain­ing his mas­ters in the­ol­ogy in 1853.

But the­ol­ogy was not to be John Mer­cer Langston’s call­ing. He wanted to become a lawyer. A dif­fi­cult task in any age, it was nearly impos­si­ble for an African Amer­i­can before the Civil War. In 1853, there were only three licensed African Amer­i­can lawyers in the entire nation. Despite sev­eral attempts, no law school would accept Langston as a stu­dent. At that time, how­ever, many lawyers did not attend law school and Langston went to Elyria to apprentice.

He learned quickly and by the fol­low­ing year was ready to prac­tice law on his own. In order to do so, the local dis­trict court had to con­firm that he had suf­fi­cient knowl­edge to prac­tice law. Even in Ohio in 1854, Langston’s race was an issue. The court con­firmed that he had suf­fi­cient knowl­edge but had to make a find­ing that he was, “nearer white than black” in order to admit him to the prac­tice of law. In so doing, John Mer­cer Langston become the first African Amer­i­can lawyer in Ohio.

The fol­low­ing year the cit­i­zens of Brown­helm Town­ship, Ohio (just south of Ver­mil­lion) elected Langston to be the town­ship clerk mak­ing him one of the first African Amer­i­can office hold­ers in the nation and the first in Ohio. After serv­ing on the Ober­lin board of edu­ca­tion, the Ober­lin city coun­cil and act­ing as a recruiter dur­ing the Civil War, Langston and his wife moved to Wash­ing­ton where he founded the law school at Howard Uni­ver­sity, served as the school’s Dean and was appointed by another Ohioan, Pres­i­dent Grant, to the D.C. Board of Health. Pres­i­dent Garfield later appointed him min­is­ter to Haiti.

In 1888, Langston took on his most daunt­ing chal­lenge, run­ning for office in Vir­ginia. His elec­tion to the U.S. House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives was chal­lenged in court for more than a year and just seven months remained in his term when he assumed his seat as the first African Amer­i­can elected to Con­gress from Virginia.

John Mer­cer Langston’s great-nephew Langston Hughes is cer­tainly more widely known today, but the prac­tic­ing bar in Ohio rightly remem­bers Langston for his firsts in the Buck­eye State.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and a for­mer assis­tant pros­e­cut­ing attorney.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Feb 3 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.