June 24 - BlackFacts.com Black History Minute

BlackFacts.com: Learn/Teach/Create Black History

BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for June 24.

John R. Lynch became first African-American to preside over deliberations of a national political party.

Born into slavery in Louisiana, he became free in 1863 under the Emancipation Proclamation.

He became active in the Republican Party by the age of 20. Although too young to participate as a delegate, he attended the state's constitutional convention of 1867, studying its developments closely.

At the age of 26 in 1872, Lynch was elected as the youngest member of the US Congress from Mississippi's 6th congressional district, as part of the first generation of African-American Congressmen.

Lynch introduced many bills and argued on their behalf. Perhaps his greatest effort was in the long debate supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to ban discrimination in public accommodations.

He was one of seven African-American Congressmen present, who all testified in 1874 as to personal and known experience of the effects of discrimination in this area.

In 1884, Lynch became the first African American to chair a political party's National Convention.

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