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John Mercer Langston (December 14, 1829 – November 15, 1897) was an American abolitionist, attorney, educator, activist, diplomat, and politician. He was the first dean of the law school at Howard University and helped create the department. He was the first president of what is now Virginia State University, a historically black college. Born a free black in Virginia to a freedwoman of mixed race and a Virginia planter father, in 1888 Langston was elected to the U.S. Congress as the first representative of color from Virginia. The black congressman, Joseph Hayne Rainey of South Carolina, had been elected in 1870 during the Reconstruction era. In the Jim Crow era of the later nineteenth century, Langston was one of only five African Americans elected to Congress from the South before the former Confederate states passed constitutions and electoral rules from 1890 to 1908 that essentially eliminated the black vote. After that, no African Americans would be elected from the South until 1973, after the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed to enforce constitutional rights. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the gerrymandered district lines that southern Democratic State legislatures had drawn to keep blacks from having enough of a presence in any district to be able to elect a black. Langston's early career was based in Ohio where, with his brother Charles, he began his lifelong work for African-American freedom, education, equal rights and suffrage. In 1855 he was one of the first African-American people in the United States elected to public office when elected as a town clerk in Ohio.〔〔〔 He was the younger brother of Charles Henry Langston, a fellow abolitionist; John was a great-uncle of the renowned poet Langston Hughes. ==Early life and education== John Mercer Langston was born free in 1829 in Louisa County, Virginia, the youngest of a daughter and three sons of Lucy Jane Langston, a freedwoman of mixed African and Native American descent, and Ralph Quarles, a white plantation owner.〔Quarles was the descendant of the 17th-century English poet Francis Quarles, Wagner (1973), p. 386.〕 Quarles had freed Lucy and their daughter Maria in 1806, in the course of what was a relationship of more than 25 years. Their three sons were born free.〔Cheek, William Francis, and Aimee Lee Cheek, ''John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65,'' Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989, pp. 11-12.〕 John's older brothers were Gideon and Charles Henry. Lucy had three children with another partner before she moved into the Great House and deepened her relationship with Quarles. Their three sons were born after her move. Of the older half-siblings, William Langston was most involved with Quarles' sons. He relocated with them to Chillicothe, Ohio (see below).〔 Before his death, Ralph Quarles arranged for his Quaker friend William Gooch to be made guardian of his children. As requested by Quarles, after the parents both died in 1833 when John Langston was four, Gooch moved with the boys and their half-brother William Langston to Chillicothe, Ohio, in a free state.〔Frederick J. Blue, (''No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics'' ), Louisiana State University Press, 2006, p. 66.〕 Quarles had reserved funds for the boys' education. In 1835 the older brothers Gideon and Charles started at the preparatory school at Oberlin College, where they were the first African-American students to be admitted.〔Richard B. Sheridan, ("Charles Henry Langston and the African American Struggle in Kansas" ), ''Kansas State History'', Winter 1999, retrieved December 15, 2008.〕 Gideon looked much like his father and took his surname at the age of 21, and thereafter was known as Gideon Quarles.〔 The youngest Langston followed his brothers, enrolling in the preparatory program at Oberlin College at the age of fourteen. John Langston earned a bachelor's degree in 1849 and a master's degree in theology in 1852 from Oberlin. Denied admission to law schools in New York and Ohio because of his race, Langston studied law (or "read law", as was the common practice then) under attorney and Republican US congressman Philemon Bliss; he was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1854. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「John Mercer Langston」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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