John Mercer Langston (December 14, 1829 – November 15, 1897) was an African-American abolitionist, attorney, educator, activist, diplomat, and politician. He was the founding 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. He was elected a U.S. Representative from Virginia and wrote From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol; Or, the First and Only Negro Representative in Congress From the Old Dominion.
Born free in Virginia to a freedwoman of mixed ethnicity and a white English immigrant planter, Langston was elected to the United States Congress in 1888. He was the first Representative of color from Virginia. Joseph Hayne Rainey, the first black congressman in American history, had been elected in 1870 during the Reconstruction era.