Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Langston, OK

Langston is a town in Logan County, Oklahoma, about ten miles east of Guthrie, and it is part of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area.

Langston was founded in 1890 by Edward P. McCabe, a Black political leader from Kansas who promoted Black migration to Oklahoma Territory in hopes of creating a majority-Black state.

The town was named for John Mercer Langston, a Black educator who became the first Black Virginian elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Langston is one of roughly fifty all-Black towns founded in Oklahoma between 1865 and 1920, and it is the largest of those historic Black towns still surviving today.

The town boomed at first, reaching about 600 settlers by 1892, with its own school, newspaper, churches, and some twenty-five businesses.

Early property deeds in Langston stipulated that lots could be resold only to African Americans, a restriction meant to keep the town Black-owned.

In 1897 the Oklahoma Territorial Legislature created the Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, which opened in 1898 with its first classes held in a Presbyterian church.

That school was renamed Langston University in 1941, and it remains Oklahoma's only historically Black university — and the westernmost HBCU in the United States.

Langston University helped the town endure the Great Depression, which emptied many other small Oklahoma towns, Black and white alike.

The 2020 census counted 1,619 people in Langston, a figure that includes the university's students.