Description
The book is an enhanced retelling of Langston's 1894 autobiography "From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capital or The First and only Negro Representative in Congress from the Old Dominion."
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John Mercer Langston was the first black American elected to Congress, despite a fraudulent election (1888) that denied him his seat for nineteen months. He was born in Virginia to a white planter and his former slave, orphaned at four, sent to Ohio, was an abolitionist, orator, rejected by law schools but studied under Judge Bliss and became the first black attorney in Ohio and the first to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. He founded Howard University's law school and was its dean, was appointed the first president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (Now Virginia State University), was inspector General of the Freedmen's Bureau, and resident minister of Haiti. He was a colleague and rival of Frederick Douglass.
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