Eric Foner compiled an excellent reference book, Freedom’s Lawmakers, that contains collective biographies of more than 1500 black Reconstruction lawmakers. Democratic ex-Confederate leaders painted blacks as lazy, ignorant, incompetent buffoons, to undermine their determination to vote and to hold elective office. These fantastic leaders prevailed to hold public office in their communities, states, and their nation. Throughout the country, these black leaders held positions as farmers, teachers, Justices of the Peace, police officers, lawyers, sheriffs, ministers, mayors, state officeholders, editors, U.S. Congressmen, and U.S. Senators.
Leaders like Moses Avery, editor of the New Orleans Tribune, which was the first Black-owned daily newspaper, also a Methodist minister, and delegate to the Republican State Conventions in Louisiana and Alabama was a stellar representative of this group. Alexander E. Barber was born a slave, worked on the Mississippi steamboats and became Vice President of the January 1865 convention held in New Orleans to demand black suffrage and was the founder of the New Orleans Black Republican. Frederick Douglass described him as “a man of unquestioned and uninterrupted African descent.”
If the Democrats were not successful in driving these Southern leaders out of office during and after Reconstruction, where might we be today?