On this day in 1837, James Rapier, who served one term in Congress as the Reconstruction era came to a close, was born as a free African-American in Florence, Ala. His father, a barber, sent him to Nashville, Tenn., where he was reared by his grandmother, a slave, who worked as a clothes cleaner.
After being educated in a secret school for blacks, Rapier spent a good deal of time gambling on riverboats. His disappointed father then sent him to a fugitive slave community in Buxton, Ontario, Canada.
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In 1864, a rehabilitated Rapier moved first to Tennessee, and then to Alabama, where he became a successful cotton planter. His reputation for treating his black tenant farmers well earned him plaudits, advancing his political career in a white-majority southeastern Alabama district.
After being elected to Congress as a Republican in 1873, Rapier sought to secure passage of a civil rights bill aimed at enforcing equality in public accommodations, transportation and public schools. Opponents stripped the bill of most of its protective clauses while Rapier and six other Reconstruction-era African-American congressmen offered personal accounts of the discrimination they had encountered on trains and in restaurants.
“Every day, my life and property are exposed, are left to the mercy of others and will be so long as every hotel-keeper, railroad conductor and steamboat captain can refuse me with impunity,” Rapier said. “I have no compromise to offer on this subject … After all, this question resolves itself into this: Either I am a man, or I am not a man.”
By a vote of 162 to 99, the House passed a watered-down version of the bill. After the Senate concurred, President Ulysses Grant signed it into law on March 1, 1875.
During the 1874 election, Ku Klux Klan violence dashed Rapier’s hopes for reelection. He died in 1883 of tuberculosis.
SOURCE: OFFICE OF HISTORY AND PRESERVATION, CLERK OF THE U.S. HOUSE