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JOHN MERCER LANGSTON: Black Protest Leader and Abolitionist William F. Cheek Prejudice, priority, and principle have dictated a white historical past. Together they help to account for our greatest handicap in reconstructing the black heritage: the scarcity of source materials. Humiliating though it may be for the historian to admit, diligent research, combined with imaginative use of interdisciplinary skills, can restore all too little of the preciousness, the particularities, the usefulness of the lives of previous Negro Americans. Still, we have barely begun to tap the records that are available or to consider subjects that merit investigation. One largely unexplored field is the role of the black abolitionist, who more often than not combined his antislavery labors with agitation for civil rights. Major works on the antislavery movement and even general histories of the Negro do little more than list the names of some black participants, with only brief factual comment on their areas of involvement.1 Of the twenty or so men and women who achieved some celebrity as black activists in antebellum America, only the preeminent Frederick Douglass has received more than limited attention from scholars. One measure of our ignorance in this regard is the almost total neglect of a versatile and articulate Negro leader, John Mercer Längsten . What little has been written about him falls in the period after 1861, when admittedly he achieved his greatest prominence, as recruiter of Negro soldiers, educational inspector for the Freedmen's Bureau, Republican party orator, law dean and later acting president of Howard University, member of the Board of Health of Washington, D.C., minister to Haiti, president of a Negro college in Virginia, and, climactically , congressman from Virginia's fourth district. Nowhere recognized are his pre-war contributions as an Ohio protest leader and abolitionist.2 Fortunately, since a partial record of 1 A few exceptions should be noted: Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York, 1969); Leon Litwack, "The Emancipation of the Negro Abolitionist," in Martin Duberman (ed.), The Antishvery Vanguard (Princeton, 1965), pp. 137-155; Leon Litwack, North of Shvery (Chicago, 1961); August Meier and Elliott M. Rudwick, From Phntation to Ghetto (New York, 1966), pp. 94-122. 2 In Black Abolitionists, Ouarles makes two casual references to Langston's speaking engagements and includes a paragraph citing several of his efforts to gain the right to vote for black people in Ohio. Litwack, in North of Shvery, a study of the northern free Negro, mentions Langston's name once, in a Listing of nine black mili101 102civil war history his early career survives, it is possible to reconstruct some of his activities , as well as to speculate both on his motivations and attitudes. Most celebrated as an orator, he emerges also as a writer, agitator and organizer. Working at times with white abolitionists but more often with the black convention movement in Ohio which, partially because of his efforts, was the most militant and sustained of the blackstate movements in the 1850's, Langston advocated freedom for the slave and full legal and social equality for the northern black man. Though he and his co-workers were powerless to effect those changes in the Negro's condition they so strongly desired, Langston demonstrated by the variety and scope of his involvement a persistent refusal to accept the contemporary realities of slavery and racism. Born in Louisa County, Virginia, in 1829, Langston was the third son of a white plantation owner and his part-Indian, part-Negro freedwoman . Both parents died when the boy was quite young, but he was left with a generous inheritance that not only paid for an excellent education , with consequent social and professional advantages, but also underwrote his reform efforts. Moreover, in contrast to many halfwhite Negroes, who hated or were ashamed of their fathers, Langston drew strength from the image of his father as a prosperous and kindly planter who believed in educating his slaves and then freeing them; who, despite ostracism by neighbors, loved his light-skinned mistress and lived with her for more than twenty years.3 After the deaths of his parents the boy, at the age of four, was taken to Ohio, where over the following decade...

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