During the Massive resistance controversy over school desegregation, Alabama expelled the NAACP in 1956, so LeFlore helped found the Non-Partisan Voting League.
In 1925, he founded the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, leading it for decades and working to improve civil rights for the black community.
He served four terms as city commissioner, continuing to work with LeFlore on voting rights, hiring of blacks as municipal employees, and integration of public facilities.
[2] During this period, the NPVL worked to increase hiring of black employees in city government, sued for desegregation of the Mobile public school system after the US Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), "filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Justice to open public accommodations to all, [and] launched massive voter registration drive campaigns to bring large numbers of African Americans into the political process..."[2] In 1974, nearly a decade after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 expanded participation by African Americans in politics in the South, Langan was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives as a Democrat.
In 1975, the NPVL initiated a legal challenge to Mobile's city commission form of government, saying that the at-large voting for three commissioners prevented the African-American minority from electing representatives of their choice.