James T. Rapier
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James Thomas Rapier (November 13, 1837 – May 31, 1883) was an American lawyer and politician from
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during the
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. He served as a
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from Alabama, for one term from 1873 until 1875. Born free in Alabama, he went to school in
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and earned a law degree in
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before being admitted to the bar in
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. Rapier was a nationally prominent figure in the Republican Party, one of seven blacks serving in the 43rd Congress. He worked in 1874 for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed equal access to public accommodations until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1883. It was the last federal civil rights law enacted until the passage of Civil Rights Act of 1957. Parts of the law were re-adopted in the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 () is a landmark civil rights and United States labor law, labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on Race (human categorization), race, Person of color, color, religion, sex, and nationa ...
and Civil Rights Act of 1968.


Early life

Rapier was born free in 1837 in Florence, Alabama, to John H. Rapier, a prosperous local barber, and his wife. They were established
free people of color In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color (; ) were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who we ...
. He had three older brothers. His father had been emancipated in 1829; his mother was born into a free black family of
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. She died in 1841 when Rapier was four years old. In 1842 James and his brother John Jr. went to
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, to live with their paternal grandmother Sally Thomas.Brett J. Derbes, "James T. Rapier"
''Encyclopedia of Alabama'', 27 June 2012; accessed 19 April 2018
"James Thomas Rapier"
Black Past, accessed 6 April 2014
There they attended a school for African-American children, and learned to read and write. In 1856 Rapier traveled to Canada with his uncle Henry Thomas, his father's half-brother, who settled in Buxton, Ontario, an all-black community made up chiefly of African Americans. It was developed with the aid of Rev. William King, a Scots-American
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missionary. King had bought land (with Canadian government approval) for resettlement of black American refugees who had escaped to Canada during the slavery years via the Underground Railroad. The African Americans were building a thriving community, and Rapier's uncle had property there. Rapier attended the Buxton Mission School, which was highly respected and had a classical education. He earned a teaching degree in 1856 at a normal school in Toronto. He then traveled to Scotland to study at the
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. Returning to Canada, he completed his law degree at Montreal College and was admitted to the bar.


Return to U.S. and career

After teaching for a time at the Buxton Mission School. In 1864 Rapier moved in 1864 to Nashville, Tennessee. Working as a reporter for a northern newspaper, Rapier bought 200 acres in Maury County, Tennessee, and became a cotton planter. He made a keynote speech at the Tennessee Negro Suffrage Convention. He continued as an advocate for black voting rights and was disappointed in the return of Confederates to state office. With his father needing help, Rapier returned to his home in Alabama in 1866. There he bought 550 acres and again cultivated cotton. He became active in the Republican Party, serving as a delegate to the 1867 state constitutional convention. In 1870, Rapier ran for Alabama Secretary of State and lost. In 1872, he was elected to the Forty-third United States Congress from Alabama's 2nd congressional district, one of three African-American congressmen elected from the state during Reconstruction. While in Congress, he had national scope. Rapier proposed authorizing a land bureau to allocate Western lands to freedmen. He also proposed that Congress appropriate $5 million for public education in Southern schools. He was one of seven black congressmen at the time; in 1874, they each testified for the Civil Rights Act, which was signed in 1875. Rapier recalled being denied service at every inn at stopping points between Montgomery, Alabama, and Washington, D.C., despite being a US Congressman. He noted how the race issue in the United States society related to what were often class and religious inequalities in other lands, and said that he was "half slave and half free", having political rights but no civil rights. He said that in Europe, "they have princes, dukes, and lords; in India, "brahmans or priests, who rank above the sudras or laborers;" in America, "our distinction is color." After losing his re-election campaign in 1874, Rapier was appointed by the Republican presidential administration as a collector for the
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in Alabama, serving in this role until his death. He campaigned against the conservative Democratic Party's Redeemer government in Alabama, but Democrats regained control of the state legislature in 1874. After passing other restrictive laws that created
Jim Crow The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation, " Jim Crow" being a pejorative term for an African American. The last of the ...
rules, in 1901 white Democrats passed a new state constitution that required poll taxes and literacy tests for persons trying to register to vote. Under subjective white administration, these barriers essentially disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites in Alabama, excluding them from the political system for decades into the late 20th century. Rapier died in
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, on May 31, 1883, of pulmonary tuberculosis. He was buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri. The Rapier Family Papers are held by
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.


Misrepresentation by Dunning School

In 1979, historian John Hope Franklin gave a presidential addres

to the
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. He discussed how Walter L. Fleming of
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, one of the most prominent of the influential historians of the 20th-century Dunning School, had written about Rapier. Franklin observed that Fleming's viewpoint, which had been hostile to civil and
voting rights Suffrage, political franchise, or simply franchise is the right to vote in representative democracy, public, political elections and referendums (although the term is sometimes used for any right to vote). In some languages, and occasionally in ...
for
African Americans African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa ...
, may have led him to make errors. Franklin said: :Writing in 1905 Walter L. Fleming referred to James T. Rapier, a Negro member of the Alabama constitutional convention of 1867, as "Rapier of
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." He then quoted Rapier as saying that the manner in which "colored gentlemen and ladies were treated in America was beyond his comprehension." leming, ''Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama''In a footnote to his address, Franklin added: "Fleming knew better, for in another place—deep in a footnote (p. 519)—he asserted that Rapier was from Lauderdale, "educated in Canada"." Franklin explained: :Born in Alabama in 1837, Rapier, like many of his white contemporaries, went North for an education. The difference was that instead of stopping in the northern part of the United States, as, for example, (the pro-slavery advocate) William L. Yancey did, Rapier went on to Canada. Rapier's contemporaries did not regard him as a Canadian; and, if some were not precisely clear about where he was born (as was the ''Alabama State Journal'', which referred to his birthplace as Montgomery rather than Florence), they did not misplace him altogether. oren Schweninger, ''James T. Rapier and Reconstruction'' (Chicago, 1978), xvii, 15. Franklin said: "In 1905 Fleming made Rapier a Canadian because it suited his purposes to have a bold, aggressive, 'impertinent' Negro in Alabama
Reconstruction Reconstruction may refer to: Politics, history, and sociology *Reconstruction (law), the transfer of a company's (or several companies') business to a new company *''Perestroika'' (Russian for "reconstruction"), a late 20th century Soviet Union ...
come from some non-Southern, contaminating environment like Canada. But it did not suit his purposes to call Yancey, who was a graduate of
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, a 'Massachusetts Man.' Fleming described Yancey (a white Confederate) as, simply, the 'leader of the States Rights men.'" leming, ''Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama'', p. 12.For a detailed account and comparison of Yancey and other white Southerners who went North to secure an education, see Franklin's book, ''A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North'' (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), pp. 45–80. Franklin is critical of Fleming for falsely stating that Rapier, and others, were " carpetbaggers." Franklin said, "...some of the people that Fleming called carpetbaggers had lived in Alabama for years and were, therefore, entitled to at least as much presumption of assimilation in moving from some other state to Alabama decades before the war as the Irish were in moving from their native land to some community in the United States. ...Whether they had lived in Alabama for decades before the Civil War or had settled there after the war, these "carpetbaggers" were apparently not to be regarded as models for Northern investors or settlers in the early years of the twentieth century. Twentieth-century investors from the North were welcome provided they accepted the established arrangements in race relations and the like. Fleming served his Alabama friends well by ridiculing carpetbaggers, even if in the process he had to distort and misrepresent.""Historians: John Hope Franklin"
, American History Association


See also

* Civil rights movement (1865–1896) * List of African-American United States representatives


References


Further reading

*Bailey, Richard. ''They Too Call Alabama Home: African American Profiles, 1800-1999''. Montgomery: Pyramid Publishing, 1999. *Feldman, Eugene. ''Black Power in Old Alabama: The Life and Stirring Times of James T. Rapier, Afro-American Congressman from Alabama, 1839-1883''. Chicago: Museum of African American History, 1968. *Feldman, E. "James T. Rapier: Negro Congressman from Alabama." ''Phylon Quarterly'' 19 (4th Quarter, 1958): 417–423. *Freeman, Thomas J. The Life of James T. Rapier. M. A. Thesis, Auburn University, 1959 *Foner, Eric. ''Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction.,'' (Baton Rouge: LSU Press: 1996) second edition. *Franklin, John Hope. ''A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North'' (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976) *Logan, Rayford W. and Michael R. Winston, ''Dictionary of American Negro Biography'' (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1982) *Rabinowitz, Howard N., ed., ''Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era'', (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 79–100. *Ragsdale, Bruce A. and Joel D. Treese, ''Black Americans in Congress, 1870-1989'' (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1990). *Schweninger, Loren. ''James T. Rapier and Reconstruction'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) *Schweninger, L. "James Rapier and the Negro Labor Movement, 1869-1872," ''Alabama Review'' 28 (July 1975): 185–201. *"James Thomas Rapier" in ''Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007.'' Prepared under the direction of the Committee on House Administration by the Office of History & Preservation, U. S. House of Representatives. Washington: Government Printing Office, 2008


External links


Congressional biographyJames T. Rapier's June 9, 1874 Speech on the Civil Rights Bill
, discusses Walter F. Fleming's representation of Congressman James T. Rapier as a "carpetbagger" {{DEFAULTSORT:Rapier, James T. 1837 births 1883 deaths African-American politicians during the Reconstruction Era African-American members of the United States House of Representatives Politicians from Florence, Alabama 19th-century American planters Burials at Calvary Cemetery (St. Louis) Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives from Alabama 19th-century deaths from tuberculosis Tuberculosis deaths in Alabama 19th-century members of the United States House of Representatives