[1] After becoming one of only two legislators to oppose the Boswell Amendment[2] to restrict African-American suffrage, Langan failed to win re-election to the Alabama Senate.

[3] Langan opposed the Dixiecrat movement in the Democratic Party, and became a leading moderate voice in his state, working to extend voting rights for African Americans (who had been essentially disenfranchised since the turn of the century).

During the latter years of the war, Langan served with the Thirty-first Dixie Division as a chief of staff in the South Pacific during campaigns in the Philippines and New Guinea, for which he was awarded a Bronze Star with oak leaf cluster.

The shipbuilding industry had grown due to wartime contracts, and rapid industrialization also included expansion of the Army Air Force base at Brookley Field which became the major Air Materiel Command supply base in the southeastern U.S. At the same time, social tensions and competition during the war had included incidents of racial violence in 1943 and 1944, particularly since President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration required defense contractors to hire and promote workers without racial discrimination.

Moreover, in 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued Smith v. Allwright, a Texas case but which also effectively outlawed the whites-only primary customary in Alabama.

Nonetheless, that year, twelve qualified and registered black Mobilians were turned away as they attempted to vote, as photographers for national magazines documented.

[11] Langan also became an early supporter for equalizing the salaries of white and black public schoolteachers, who taught in a segregated system, and shocked some by proposing that part of a beer tax increase the Mobile School Board sought be used to rectify pay and workload disparities.

His progressive stance earned the support of civil rights leaders such as John L. LeFlore, a U.S. postal carrier in Mobile who had led the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1925.

Understanding that the local registrar's office was the key to enable registration for African Americans, Langan urged Folsom to appoint Lt. Col. E.J.

"Gunny" Gonzales (an Air Force Judge Advocate General officer who had been an athletic star and graduate of McGill Institute High School)[13] to a vacant seat on the Mobile County Board of Registrars.

Since the Mobile Press Register and his fellow commissioners publicly opposed it, Langan first called a town meeting, and when it had a positive response, the committee of 17 whites and 13 blacks was created.

However, its infrastructure lagged, particularly schools, hospitals and recreational facilities, in part because of a clause in the decades-old state constitution restricting government indebtedness.

Mobile dedicated a large new park west of the city (ultimately named after Langan) in 1957, and built enough public schools by the following year to end double sessions in classrooms.

Each was defeated in a runoff election, Luscher by George E. McNally (the first Republican to win city office since Reconstruction) and Hackmeyer by Charles S. Trimmier, who played the race card.

Long before white flight from desegregation, the report noted its parochial and private schools were among Mobile's greatest assets, as were its "stabilized" race relations.

Langan continued to work with activists such as John LeFlore and Spring Hill College professor Father Albert Foley.

The municipal golf course and public library were desegregated in 1961; two years later segregated seating on city buses ended, and black drivers were soon hired.

[24] Under a court order from Judge Daniel Holcombe Thomas, Murphy High School, Langan's alma mater, became the first Alabama public school to integrate (in the fall 1963), although a white citizens league caused trouble two days later and Langan and fellow commissioner George McNally lectured 54 students arrested for brawling about the need to follow the law.

While often criticized on moral grounds (and with an old corruption conviction reversed on appeal and an upcoming trial), Boykin had been known for "bringing in the pork", including expanding Brookley Field during and after World War II, as the Department of Defense closed bases in Tennessee and other states north of Alabama.

Moreover, Congressman Edwards soon secured a huge public works project, the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, which also helped make up the economic losses associated with Brookley's closure.

[29] In 1965, as school desegregation issues festered, Langan faced his first real opposition, from local businessman Joseph Bailey, despite the openings of the long-awaited municipal auditorium on July 9, 1964, and of Battleship Memorial Park (to host the USS Alabama (BB-60) decommissioned and towed from Seattle) on January 9, 1965.

The Mobile Press Register and white candidates by then referred to "bloc wards", alluding to support in the black community generated through the pink sheets.

[30] Unlike Mims and Outlaw, Langan faced a runoff, in which he defeated Bailey by fewer than 1,500 votes, in part through support within the black community despite the white backlash.

After 1966, the Non-Partisan Voters League faced a challenge from the left, when the Neighborhood Organized Workers (NOW) was founded by Noble Beasley[31] and others from a younger generation of African-American activists.

In 1968, Mobile like other cities experienced riots after news of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. NOW organized rallies and a 16-month boycott of white businesses before reaching an agreement to hire black sales clerks.

[33] Langan would never again hold public office, although his successor Bailey would fail to win re-election four years later because of a scandal concerning the auditorium's management.

In early 1973, Noble Beasley and his NOW associates Doc Finley and Frederick Douglas Richardson were jailed on charges of extortion, distribution of heroin and income tax evasion.

In August 2009, the city of Mobile dedicated Unity Point Park, a small public space located at the historic boundary between the white and black sections of town.

The park features a large bronze statue of Joseph Langan and John LeFlore standing together, to honor their efforts in securing equality for all Mobilians.