Langston University

Overview

Langston University is a public, land-grant historically Black university in Langston, Oklahoma, the only historically Black college in the state and the westernmost four-year public HBCU in the country, founded in 1897 as the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University. Inman E. Page served as its president from 1898 to 1916. The school was created under the second Morrill Act of 1890, which required states with land-grant colleges — such as what became Oklahoma State University — to either admit African Americans or fund a separate institution for them. It was renamed Langston University in 1941, honoring John Mercer Langston, a civil rights pioneer, the first African-American member of Congress from Virginia, founder of the Howard University Law School, and U.S. consul-general to Haiti. Poet Melvin B. Tolson — later portrayed by Denzel Washington in the film The Great Debaters — taught at Langston from 1947 to 1964.