Richard Harvey Cain was born a free black in Greenbrier County, Virginia on April 12, 1825. In 1831 his parents moved to Gallipolis, Ohio where he attended school. Seventeen years later, in 1848, he joined the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and became a minister … Read MoreRichard H. Cain (1825-1887)
Alonzo Jacob Ransier, an African American Republican from South Carolina, held a series of political posts during the Reconstruction era. Ransier was born a free black man in Charleston in 1834. Little is known of his childhood and early education. At the end of the … Read MoreAlonzo J. Ransier (1834-1882)
Adolphus D. Griffin used his self-attained literacy to emerge as a newspaper editor/publisher in the West at the turn of the twentieth century. Born near Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1868, A.D. Griffin moved to Spokane, Washington where he edited one of his first newspapers, The Northwest … Read MoreAdolphus D. Griffin (1868-1916)
Isaiah Thornton Montgomery was an African American leader best known for founding the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi and for his public endorsement of black disenfranchisement. Montgomery was born enslaved on May 21, 1847 to Benjamin Thornton and Mary Lewis Montgomery on the Hurricane … Read MoreIsaiah T. Montgomery (1847-1924)
Black Nationalist, repatriationist, and minister, Henry M. Turner was 31 years old at the time of the Emancipation. Turner was born in 1834 in Newberry Courthouse, South Carolina to free black parents Sarah Greer and Hardy Turner. The self-taught Turner by the age of fifteen … Read MoreHenry McNeal Turner (1834-1915)
George H. White served as a member of the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth United States Congresses (March 4, 1897-March 3, 1901) from North Carolina’s Second Congressional District during what historian Rayford Logan has termed the nadir in race relations for the post-Reconstruction South. Born in Rosindale, … Read MoreGeorge Henry White (1852-1918)
Arnold Bertonneau was a New Orleans wine merchant, black soldier, and is best known as one of the first African American participants in Louisiana’s Reconstruction period. Born in New Orleans sometime in 1834, in 1862-63, Bertonneau was a captain in the 1st Regiment of the … Read MoreE. Arnold Bertonneau (1834-1912)
