Reminiscences of an Active Life: The Autobiography of John Roy Lynch

John Roy Lynch

Jan 2008 · Univ. Press of Mississippi

About this ebook

Born into slavery on a Louisiana plantation, John Roy Lynch (1847-1939) came to adulthood during the Reconstruction Era and lived a public-spirited life for over three decades. His political career began in 1869 with his appointment as justice of the peace. Within the year, he was elected to the Mississippi legislature and was later elected Speaker of the House. At age twenty-five, Lynch became the first African American from Mississippi to be elected to the United States Congress. He led the fight to secure passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1875. In 1884, he was elected temporary chairman of the Eighth Republican National Convention and was the first black American to deliver the keynote address. His autobiography, Reminiscences of an Active Life, reflects Lynch's thoughtful and nuanced understanding of the past and of his own experience. The book, written when he was ninety, challenges a number of traditional arguments about Reconstruction. In his experience, African Americans in the South competed on an equal basis with whites; the state governments were responsive to the needs of the people; and race was not always a decisive factor in the politics of Reconstruction. The autobiography, which would not be published until 1970, provides rich material for the study of American politics and race relations during Reconstruction. It sheds light on presidential patronage, congressional deals, and personality conflicts among national political figures. Lynch's childhood reflections reveal new dimensions to our understanding of black experience during slavery and beyond. An introduction by John Hope Franklin puts Lynch's public and private lives in the context of his times and provides an overview of how Reminiscences of an Active Life came to be written.

About the author

The son of an attorney who practiced before the U.S. Supreme Court, John Hope Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma on January 2, 1915. He received a B. A. from Fisk University in 1935 and a master's degree in 1936 and a Ph.D. in 1941 from Harvard University. During his career in education, he taught at a numerous institutions including Brooklyn College, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Duke University. He also had teaching stints in Australia, China, and Zimbabwe. He has written numerous scholarly works including The Militant South, 1800-1861 (1956); Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961); The Emancipation Proclamation (1963); and The Color Line: Legacy for the 21st Century (1993). His comprehensive history From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans (1947) is generally acknowledged to be the basic survey of African American history. He received numerous awards during his lifetime including the Medal of Freedom in 1995 and the John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanities in 2006. He worked with Thurgood Marshall's team of lawyers in their effort to end segregation in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education and participated in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and the American Studies Association. He was also a founding member of the Black Academy of Arts and served on the U.S. Commission for UNESCO and the Committee on International Exchange of Scholars. He died of congestive heart failure on March 25, 2009 at the age of 94.