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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