More than 1,500 African American officeholders served during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877) and in the years after Reconstruction before white supremacy, disenfranchisement, and the Democratic Party fully reasserted control in Southern states. Historian Canter Brown Jr. noted that in some states, such as Florida, the highest number of African Americans were elected or appointed to offices after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. The following is a partial list of notable African American officeholders from the end of the Civil War until before 1900. Dates listed are the year that a term states or the range of years served if multiple terms.
James Edward O'Hara was an American politician and attorney who in 1882, after Reconstruction, was the second African American to be elected to Congress from North Carolina. He was born in New York City to parents of mixed-race West Indian and Irish ancestry and was raised in the West Indies. As a young man, he traveled to the southern United States after the American Civil War with religious missionaries from the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, an independent black denomination, to help freedmen establish independent lives and new congregations. O'Hara became active in politics, being elected as a Republican to local and state offices.
At the end of the American Civil War, the devastation and disruption in the state of Georgia were dramatic. Wartime damage, the inability to maintain a labor force without slavery, and miserable weather had a disastrous effect on agricultural production. The state's chief cash crop, cotton, fell from a high of more than 700,000 bales in 1860 to less than 50,000 in 1865, while harvests of corn and wheat were also meager. The state government subsidized construction of numerous new railroad lines. White farmers turned to cotton as a cash crop, often using commercial fertilizers to make up for the poor soils they owned. The coastal rice plantations never recovered from the war.
Macon Bolling Allen was an American attorney who is believed to be the first African American to become a lawyer and to argue before a jury, and the second to hold a judicial position in the United States. Allen passed the bar exam in Maine in 1844 and became a Massachusetts Justice of the Peace in 1847. He moved to South Carolina after the American Civil War to practice law and was elected as a judge in 1873 and again in 1876. Following the Reconstruction Era, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he continued practicing law.
Events from the year 1805 in the United States.
Robert Morris was one of the first African-American attorneys in the United States, and was called "the first really successful colored lawyer in America."
The United States has had five African-American elected office holders prior to 1867. After Congress passed the First Military Reconstruction Act of 1867 and ratified the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1870, African Americans began to be elected or appointed to national, state, county and local offices throughout the United States.
Turner W. Bell was a famous African-American lawyer who worked on thousands of legal cases in Leavenworth and Kansas City, Missouri.
Ellis Gray Loring was an American attorney, abolitionist, and philanthropist from Boston. He co-founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society, provided legal advice to abolitionists, harbored fugitive slaves in his home, and helped finance the abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator. Loring also mentored Robert Morris, who went on to become one of the first African-American attorneys in the United States.
William A. Guilford was a businessman and state legislator from Upson County, Georgia. Guilford was a representative to Georgia's constitutional congress in 1868 and was an elected representative in Georgia's assembly during the 1868–1870 term. He was a Republican. William Guilford's father, Guilford Speer, had operated a harness and shoe shop in Thomaston, Upson County, since at least the 1840s, and was a founding organizer of St. Mary's A.M.E. Church. William Guilford opened a barber shop in Thomaston, and was involved in organizing the county's annual Emancipation Day celebration, still observed on or about 19 May each year.
Lloyd Garrison Wheeler, Sr. (1848-1909) was an African-American attorney, businessman, philanthropist, and political leader. Wheeler was the first black American to practice law in the state of Illinois and was influential in the establishment of Provident Hospital of Cook County — a medical facility still extant in the 21st century.
The "Original 33" were the first 33 African-American members of the Georgia General Assembly. They were elected to office in 1868, during the Reconstruction era. They were among the first African-American state legislators in the United States. Twenty-four of the members were ministers. Upon taking office, white Democrats, then a minority in the Assembly, conspired with enough white Republicans to expel the African-American legislators from the Assembly in September 1868. The next year, the Supreme Court of Georgia ruled that African Americans had the right to hold office in Georgia. The expelled legislators were reinstated and took office in January 1870.
Lavinia Marian Fleming Poe (1890–1974) was the first African American woman lawyer in Virginia, passing the bar exam in 1925.
Daisy D. Perkins was Ohio’s first African American female lawyer.
Jane Cleo Marshall Lucas (1920-2013) was the first African American female to pass the Maryland bar exam.
Grace G. Costavas Murphy was Michigan’s first African American female lawyer. She graduated from the Detroit College of Law in 1923. Upon being sworn in as an attorney in Wayne County the same year, Murphy became the first African American female admitted to practice law in Michigan. She died in 1932.
Mabel Watson Raimey was Wisconsin’s first African American female lawyer.
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