C.H.J. Taylor and the Rhetoric of Race in Post-Reconstruction America

Born a slave in Alabama, C.H.J. Taylor became an influential, but highly controversial, figure in the history of African American conservatism in the late nineteenth century. Taylor was Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia in Democratic President Grover Cleveland’s first administration. His nomination in Cleveland’s second administration as Minister to Bolivia, considered a “white” country, was hailed as a break with the Democratic Party’s racist past.

This book follows Taylor’s career as a journalist, orator, and political organizer during the crucial years from the end of Reconstruction to the birth of the modern civil rights movement. His view that poverty, not white racism, was the principal barrier to Black advancement, and his struggle to increase the influence of the Black vote by recruiting Blacks to vote Democratic, brought him into lively encounters with such leading figures as Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Theodore Roosevelt.