Langston, OK

Langston is a town in Logan County, about eleven miles northeast of Guthrie and within the Oklahoma City metropolitan region. The 2020 Census counted 1,619 residents. Edward P. McCabe and other Black settlers founded Langston on April 22, 1890, naming it for John Mercer Langston. The town is one of Oklahoma’s historic all-Black towns, and its founding was tied to a larger effort by Black migrants to build communities, schools, and political power in Oklahoma Territory.

Langston University gives the town its national significance and its daily scale. Founded as the Colored Agricultural and Normal University on March 12, 1897, it began instruction in a local Presbyterian church in 1898 and took the Langston University name in 1941. It remains Oklahoma’s only historically Black college or university, with academic, research, agricultural extension, and urban-campus work reaching beyond the main campus. The town and university grew together: Langston’s streets hold the story of an all-Black settlement, while the campus continues the educational mission that helped define the place from the beginning.