 After the American Civil War, he was appointed as general superintendent of refugees and freedmen for the Freedmen's Bureau in Kansas.In 1872 he was appointed as principal of the Quindaro Freedman's School (later Western University), the first black college west of the Mississippi River.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).