Charles Henry Langston

Charles Henry Langston (1817–1892) was an American abolitionist and political activist who was active in Ohio and later in Kansas, during and after the American Civil War, where he worked for black suffrage and other civil rights. He was a spokesman for blacks of Kansas and "the West".^[1]

Born free in Louisa County, Virginia, he was the son of a wealthy white planter and his common-law wife of African American-Pamunkey ancestry, whom his father freed. His father provided for his sons' education and ensured Langston and his brothers inherited his estate. In 1835 Langston and his older brother Gideon were the first African Americans to attend Oberlin College in Ohio.

Langston worked for 30 years for equal rights, suffrage and education in Ohio and Kansas. In 1858, Langston was tried with a white colleague for the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, a cause célèbre that was a catalyst for increasing support for abolition. That year Langston helped found the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society and, with his younger brother John as president, led it as executive secretary. After the American Civil War, he was appointed as general superintendent of refugees and freedmen for the Freedmen's Bureau in Kansas. In 1872 he was appointed as principal of the Quindaro Freedman's School (later Western University), the first black college west of the Mississippi River.

He was an older brother of John Mercer Langston, an accomplished attorney and activist, who had numerous appointed posts, and in 1888 was the first black person elected to the United States Congress from Virginia (and the last for nearly a century). Charles was the grandfather of renowned poet Langston Hughes.