Charles Henry Langston (1817–1892) was an American abolitionist and political activist who was active in Ohio and later in Kansas, during and after the American Civil War, where he worked for black suffrage and other civil rights. He was a spokesman for blacks of Kansas and "the West". 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). Charles was the grandfather of renowned poet Langston Hughes.