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The 1st Black
Presidential Candidate

The candidate that most have forgotten or
never heard of

Congress Woman Shirley Chisolm

Rev. Jessy Jackson

George Edwin Taylor

The 1st Black Presidential Candidate that ran for President of the United States.

George Taylor actually ran against

Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt

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A Forgotten Presidential
Candidate From 1904

Many people believe that Congress Woman Shirley Chisolm was the first

African-American to run for President, Jessy Jackson 2nd, and then

Barak Obama

Despite what you read in some history books such as the Biographical Dictionary of Congressional Women Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) was not in 1972 the first African-American candidate to run for president of the United States. In 1904, George Edwin Taylor often forgotten in the discussion of black American political pioneers ran for president as the candidate of the National Negro Liberty Party, sometimes known as the National Liberty Party.

Son Of A Slave

A journalist by trade, Taylor who lived in Iowa gained distinction, according to the Tacoma, Wash., Times on Aug. 17, 1904, as a leader in the Republican national convention of 1892, "to which he was an alternate delegate-at-large from his state. The next campaign he was delegate-at-large to the Democratic convention."

In 1904, 36 states sent representatives to the Liberty Party convention. According to the Times, the party denounced the Democrats' disenfranchisement of black Americans. It questioned Theodore Roosevelt's fidelity to African-Americans and it stood for "unqualified enforcement of the constitution," reparations for ex-slaves and independence for the Philippines.

The candidate Taylor, the paper announced, was one of a dozen children whose father was a slave and his mother was born a free person in the South. "When his mother died," the paper notes, "young Taylor was left a waif and slept in dry goods boxes. He finally drifted north and attended the Baptist academy at Beaver Dam, in Wisconsin. Feeble health and an exhausted pocketbook caused him to leave school within a year of graduating."

Continue Reading About George Edwin Taylor

In the late nineteenth century, many white Louisianans attempted to reverse the gains African Americans had made during Reconstruction. The implementation of Jim Crow or racial segregation laws—institutionalized white supremacy and Black inferiority throughout the South. The term Jim Crow originated in minstrel shows, the popular vaudeville-type traveling stage plays thahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3QaLNsWW9Mt circulated in the South in the mid-nineteenth century. Jim Crow was a stock character, a stereotypically lazy and shiftless Black buffoon, designed to elicit laughs with his avoidance of work and dancing ability. By 1880, however, “Jim Crow” came to signify a model of race relations in which African Americans and white Americans operated in separate social planes. Almost one hundred years would pass before civil rights workers were able to reverse these laws.

JIM CROW ETIQUETT NORMS

The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: whites were superior to blacks in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior; sexual relations between blacks and whites would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating blacks as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. The following Jim Crow etiquette norms show how inclusive and pervasive these norms were:

A black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a white male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a white woman, because he risked being accused of rape.
Blacks and whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them.
Under no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white female -- that gesture implied intimacy.
Blacks were not allowed to show public affection toward one another in public, especially kissing, because it offended whites.
Jim Crow etiquette prescribed that blacks were introduced to whites, never whites to blacks. For example: "Mr. Peters (the white person), this is Charlie (the black person), that I spoke to you about."
Whites did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to blacks, for example, Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sir, or Ma'am. Instead, blacks were called by their first names. Blacks had to use courtesy titles when referring to whites, and were not allowed to call them by their first names.
If a black person rode in a car driven by a white person, the black person sat in the back seat, or the back of a truck.
White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections.

Stetson Kennedy, the author of Jim Crow Guide (1990), offered these simple rules that blacks were supposed to observe in conversing with whites:

Never assert or even intimate that a white person is lying.
Never impute dishonorable intentions to a white person.
Never suggest that a white person is from an inferior class.
Never lay claim to, or overly demonstrate, superior knowledge or intelligence.
Never curse a white person.
Never laugh derisively at a white person.
Never comment upon the appearance of a white female.

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The 1st Black Presidential Candidate