T 24 estate to his sons.
EARLY LIFE John was four when both his father and mother, Lucy Langston, who was part Native American and black, died in 1834. Because of recent laws that restricted free blacks in Virginia, a reac-
THE ODYSSEY OF JOHN MERCER LANGSTON, THE FIRST MAN OF COLOR TO REPRESENT VIRGINIA IN THE U.S. CONGRESS, WAS A LIFELONG STRUGGLE TO SECURE FREEDOM AND EQUALITY FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS.
BORN TO A FORMER SLAVE AND HER FORMER MASTER in 1829 on a plantation in Louisa County, Virginia, Langston passed the bar before he was 25 despite being refused acceptance into law school on account of his color. Still, Langston was the beneficiary
of advantages few born of a slave received. His father, Ralph Quarles, treated him and his older brothers, Gideon and Charles, as his own. Quarles embodied the qualities of the so-called benevolent slaveholder. As Langston wrote in his 1894 autobiog- raphy, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol: Or, the First and Only Negro Representative in Congress from the Old Dominion, Quarles employed no overseers, rotating this duty among the slaves, and believed that slavery should be abolished, but voluntarily by each slaveholder. “He held that slaves should be dealt with… [so] as to prevent cruelty,” he wrote, “… and to inspire in them… feelings of confidence in their master.”1
Quarles left his considerable
tion to the Nat Turner uprising three years earlier, it was decided that the boys would leave for Ohio and that the plantation and other assets be sold. Te boys took the surname of their mother. According to the terms of their father’s will, the boys were not permitted their inheritance until their 21st birthdays. Gideon took charge of Charles, but a close friend of Quarles’, Colonel John Gooch, became John’s guardian. John lived a carefree life with
the Gooch family for five years near Chillicothe, Ohio, about 80 miles east of Cincinnati. He wrote that it was among the happiest periods of his life. Gooch’s oldest daughter, Virginia, a student at the Young Ladies Seminary in Chillicothe, taught him the fundamentals of reading and proper speech. Gooch, with whom Quarles had entrusted the responsibility of the boys’ education, helped Gideon and Charles enroll at the Preparatory Academy at Oberlin. John’s life was disrupted when
Gooch found better business oppor- tunities in Missouri, a slave state, and asked John to join the family in their move. Concerned about John’s safety in a slave state, his older half-brother, William, who had been emancipated years earlier by Quarles and lived in Chillicothe, obtained a court order to block John from moving. Richard Long, an abolitionist
from New England who purchased DIVERSITY & THE BAR® JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2014
the Gooch property, became John’s new guardian. Long believed in self- reliance and put John to work around the farm before later sending him to one of the best schools for young black students in Cincinnati, which was operated by the Baker Street Baptist Church. While in Cincinnati, he lived through one of the era’s worst race riots there, in 1841. Te riot, which followed similar
race riots that had occurred in 1829 and 1837, had been precipitated by the growing participation of black and white abolitionists in the Underground Railroad. Mobs of angry slaveholders formed across the river in Kentucky, and burned and looted black neighborhoods, which were provided little protection from law enforcement and which forced black citizens to come to their own defense in protecting their property.2 Te incident opened young Langston’s eyes to the problem of race like never before. It also allowed him to hear the eloquence of the city’s black activists, who rallied their fellow citizens in defense of their freedom.
STUDENT / TEACHER John enrolled at Oberlin Preparatory School in 1844, boarding at the home of mathematics professor George Whipple. It proved to be a life-chang- ing experience. At Oberlin John’s
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