[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.
That year Langston helped found the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society and, with his younger brother John as president, led it as executive secretary.
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).
In addition to freeing Lucy and Maria, Quarles made legal provisions for his "natural" (illegitimate) children to inherit his substantial fortune after his death.
[3] In 1835 the older brothers Gideon and Charles started at the preparatory school at Oberlin College, where they were the first students of African descent to be admitted.
Langston quickly became involved in black political affairs in Ohio, where Oberlin was the center of a strong abolitionist movement, with supporters aiding a station on the Underground Railroad.
In 1858 the older Langston was one of a group of men who freed runaway slave John Price from a US Marshal and his assistants in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue.
As a result of negotiations between state and federal officials, only Charles Langston and Simon M. Bushnell, a white man, were tried for their part in subverting the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.
He made a rousing statement of the case for abolition and for justice for "colored men", Langston closed with these words: But I stand up here to say, that if for doing what I did on that day at Wellington, I am to go to jail six months, and pay a fine of a thousand dollars, according to the Fugitive Slave Law, and such is the protection the laws of this country afford me, I must take upon my self the responsibility of self-protection; and when I come to be claimed by some perjured wretch as his slave, I shall never be taken into slavery.
Langston and Bushnell sued for a writ of habeas corpus in 1859 in the Ohio Supreme Court, but it ruled against them, with the judge saying he had no choice but to uphold the federal law.
Early in the Civil War in 1862, Langston moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, where he organized a school for contrabands, escaped slaves who had fled to Union lines from Missouri.
Opponents suggested that recently emancipated black men should not receive suffrage before educated women; both franchise measures were defeated.
Despite the efforts of many activists in the state, the legislature did not enfranchise black men until after national passage in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment granting the franchise to males without regard for race.
"[1] In 1872, Langston was appointed as president of Quindaro Freedman's School (later Western University), then located on the outskirts of Kansas City west of the Missouri River.
Chartered in 1865 by a group of white abolitionists, Quindaro Freedman's School developed as the earliest college for blacks established west of the Mississippi River.
As the black population increased rapidly in Kansas in the decades during and after the Reconstruction era, Langston worked to aid the "exodusters" and other early migrants.
In 1880 Langston was president of a statewide Convention of Colored Men that called on the Refugee Relief Board to use monies and goods donated for the new migrants and settle them on school properties to help them get established.
[5] In Lawrence, Langston also served as associate editor of the Historic Times, a local paper that promoted the cause of equal rights and justice for blacks.
[5] In addition to his political activities, while in Columbus, Ohio, Langston was president of the Colored Benevolent Society, first Worshipful Master of St. Mark's Lodge No.
[5] Charles Langston used his time and talents to improve the lives of his fellow African Americans through his leadership in the underground railroad, slave emancipation, education, welfare, politics, fraternal orders, journalism, and other activities.