"John Mercer Lanston" (1829-1897)

Is credited with being the first African American who became an elected official in the United States,elected town clerk of Oberlin,Ohio, in 1855.Later he served briefly in the congress and was recognized during reconstruction as the African-American leader second in importance only to Frederick Douglass.As an elected official and member of Congress,John's leadership is comparable to that of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.,who served in Congress during the Civil Rights movement.John was born free in Virginia in 1829.His father was a white slaveholder,married to a woman of mixed African and Native American ancestry.When his father died,he left John a substantial inheritance,which he used to get an extensive education and, through investments in real estate, a substantial fortune.After receiving degrees in education and theology from Oberlin College in 1850,he aspired to become a lawyer.But Ohio law prohibited blacks from practicing law.After studying with a white attorney,the Ohio authorities ruled that John's light skin entitled him to the rights and privileges of white men,and he was admitted to the bar in 1854 as the state's first black attorney.John was eventually placed in charge of Oberlin's legal affairs,was elected to the town council,and played an important role in shaping Oberlin's public education system. Prior to his political successes in Oberlin, John was active in protest politics in Ohio,working in the Abolitionist Movement and in the state's chapter of the National Negro Convention.At this stage of his work he exhibited a militancy that expressed itself in support of emigration and black nationalism.John supported black nationalism and emigration in the early 1850s because he, like Martin Delany,said he believed that the forces of racism and white supremacy were unlikely to ever fundamentally change,and therefore freedom and equality for African were impossible in the United States.But as his professional and political aspirations in Oberlin were fulfilled,John changed his mind and embraced the ideology of integrationism,writing that black Americans could some day hope for "liberation" in the land of their birth. After the civil war he joined the staff of the Freedmen'sBureau,where he traveled  throughout the southern states encouraging political participation by the former slaves in Reconstruction government and politics .After his travels through the Southern states, he joined the faculty of Howard University,where he became dean of the law school and acting president.His application to become Howard's first black president was rejected because of his race.Angry and bitter,John and the entire law faculty resigned in protest.From 1864-1868  he was president of the National Equal Rights League.Founded at the 1864 National Negro Convention,the league was an early precursor of the NAACP.He was also active in Republican Party politics,working in the presidential campaigns of Ulysses S.Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes and helping Charles Sumner to draft the Civils Rights Act of 1875. Rutherford appointed John to the diplomatic Bureaucracy as minister to Haiti for eight years. When he returned to the United States he ran for the Congress from a heavily black congressional district in Virginia. He won the election,through fraud and corruption the seat was awarded to his white Democratic Party opponent.