Monday, June 3, 2019

This Day in Reconstruction History (TR-Boosted Lynch Becomes 1st African-American Party Chair)


June 3, 1884—In a Republican National Convention mirroring the deep racial divisions of the nation, the delegates selected John R. Lynch of Mississippi—a three-term Congressman continually fighting white supremacy in the post-Civil War South—as Temporary Chairman. 

The title, though largely honorific, still represented the last time an African-American would be named a party chairman for the next hundred years—just as, at the same gathering, Lynch would become the only African American to deliver a keynote address at a national political convention until 1968.

At the convention, Lynch impressed two young politicos who became friends and would go on to lead the GOP at the start of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge (a future President and Senate Majority Leader, respectively). 

Alarmed at the National Committee’s nomination of Arkansas’ Powell Clayton—a byword for corruption in his state—to the chairmanship, they had stayed up the night before, buttonholing delegates to switch their votes to Lynch. 

By nominating Lynch—and in persuading delegates to make the unprecedented move—TR, in his first appearance on the national stage, was already serving notice that he would not be bound by the normal partisan rules. (The story of that little-known convention fight is told by Jon Knokey’s Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of American Leadership.)

Son of an Irish immigrant overseer and a female slave, Lynch successfully managed a photographer’s studio, then invested in local real estate. 

Still just a decade and a half before, Lynch—then only in his early 20s—was a political star, rising successfully from a local justice of the peace to speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives to Congressman. 

His increasing marginalization since then symbolized the larger fate of African-Americans in an America that had abandoned its Reconstruction experiment in postwar racial justice.

Throughout his six years in Congress, Lynch pushed for several important pieces of legislation, including:

*funds to reimburse a Natchez orphanage damaged in the war;

*appropriations to improve the shoreline of the Mississippi River;

*dividing the state into two judicial districts; 

*laws to reimburse depositors who lost money when the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company failed;

*appropriations for a National Board of Health; and 

*supporting the Civil Rights Bill of 1875.

In advocating for the Civil Rights Bill, Lynch was especially cogent. While denying any inclination on the part of African-Americans to mingle in the social life of whites, he still denounced the indignities heaped upon his race by segregated public accommodations and public transportation.

Systematic disenfranchisement of African-American voters meant that Lynch could not hold onto his congressional seat. Sometimes the methods were blunt: threats and killings of those who exercised the franchise, for instance. Other times it was more subtle, such as “grandfather clauses” forbidding the vote to anyone whose grandfather was not a citizen, or literacy or property tests administered inequitably between the races.

For the remaining half-century of his life, as white America retreated further from the struggle for civil rights for all, Lynch fought a rear-guard action. He had used words, in Congress and at the GOP convention, to advance the cause of African-Americans and their GOP allies, and from now on he would use words to puncture holes in the negative thinking of historians then taking hold.

Jim Crow legislation, aided by adverse Supreme Court decisions, continually eroded the gains won under dire circumstances by Lynch and other freedmen. By the time of his death in the late 1930s, African-Americans may have been plunged into the deepest heart of the abyss, as they could not enact even anti-lynching legislation. He was, in fact, working on a defense of Reconstruction at the time of his death.

The fate of Lynch and other freedmen are coming increasingly into the history books as a result of a new understanding of Reconstruction that flowered with the civil-rights movement approximately 60 years ago, demonstrated most recently by Stony the Road, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s book-PBS documentary tie-in.

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