George Edwin Taylor (August 4, 1857 – December 23, 1925) was an American journalist, editor, political activist, and politician. In 1904, he was the candidate of the National Negro Liberty Party for President of the United States. He was the first African American to run for president.
Taylor was born free in Little Rock, Arkansas, because his mother was free. His father was enslaved. His mother took him to Alton, Illinois, where she died. He reached La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1865, where he lived with the family of a ship cook. After they left the city, he was placed in a foster home at age 10, and lived with that family until he was 20. He attended public school. He had early work experience in La Crosse as a journalist and labor/political activist. In 1891 Taylor left Wisconsin and moved to Oskaloosa, Iowa. He published a weekly newspaper, the Negro Solicitor. In the 1890s, Taylor shifted from being an Independent Republican to the Democratic Party.
In 1892, he was founder and president of the National Colored Men's Protection League. In 1900 he was president of the National Negro Democratic League, the Negro bureau within the national Democratic Party. In 1904, Taylor joined the National Negro Liberty Party, a third party, and ran as its candidate for president of the United States. After the failure of his 1904 campaign, he returned to the Democratic Party.
Early life George Edwin Taylor was born free in Little Rock, Arkansas on August 4, 1857, because his mother Amanda Hines was a free woman of color. His father was Nathan Taylor, an enslaved African American. The precise statuses of Hines and Taylor are unknown. In 1859, Arkansas enacted a Free Negro Expulsion Bill, which required all free blacks (a "black" defined as anyone with the equivalent of one black grandparent) to leave the state by January 1, 1860, or face sale into slavery for a period of one year to cover costs of removal. At the time, about 700 free black people lived in Arkansas, fewer than in any other slave state. All but 144 free blacks left the state rather than risk slavery.Encyclopediaofarkansas.net Billy D. Higgins (2012), "Act 151 of 1859", Encyclopedia of Arkansas
Hines fled with her infant George to Alton, Illinois, which was across from St. Louis, Missouri, in a free state. It had supporters of the Underground Railroad,Elijah Parish Lovejoy and slaves were known to escape from Missouri across the Mississippi River to Illinois. During the Civil War, Alton was a major river port for the Union military. Hines died from tuberculosis in 1861 or 1862. George later claimed that as an orphan, he lived in storehouse boxes in Alton during the war years.Lincoln Evening News, September 5, 1904; Voice of the Negro, October 1904.
A month after the war ended in 1865, at age 8, George landed at the docks of La Crosse, Wisconsin on board the Hawkeye State, a steam side-paddle wheeler that operated between St. Paul, Minnesota and St. Louis, Missouri. Taylor remained in La Crosse for two or three years. During those years he was known as George Southall and likely lived with the family of Henry Southall,Mouser, Black La Crosse, pp. 38–39, 81. Murphy Library a black cook who worked on paddle wheelers. In 1867 or 1868, the Southalls moved from La Crosse.
But George, at age 10 or 11, remained in the city. A La Crosse County court judge intervened and had him assigned to black foster parents, Nathan and Sarah Smith. They cared for some of the county's orphaned or abandoned children, and lived near West Salem, Wisconsin, about 10.5 miles northeast of La Crosse. Taylor lived with the Smiths until the age of 20.Mouser, "Taylor and Smith: Benevolent Fosterage," Black La Crosse, pp. 1–3. During this period, he took the name of George Edward Taylor. He attended a country school near his home.
At age 20, Taylor enrolled at Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, where he studied for two years (1877–1879). He took a classical curriculum that emphasized grammar, language, and rhetoric. For health and financial reasons, Taylor left Wayland before completing the three-year curriculum.Mouser, "George Edwin Taylor: Leaving his mark," Greetings (July 2010), 14–19 Wayland.org
La Crosse period Taylor returned to La Crosse in 1879, and changed his middle name from Edward to Edwin. On October 15, 1885, he married Mary Hall of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. She is mentioned only once in located records.Mouser, Black La Crosse, 39–41. More detail about Taylor's La Crosse period is found in Mouser, For Labor, Race, and Liberty: George Edwin Taylor, His Historic Run for the White House, and the Making of Independent Black Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). There were no known children from this marriage.
Taylor wrote articles for several of La Crosse's newspapers and for Chicago's Inter Ocean. During this first year, he also obtained employment as city editor of the La Crosse Democrat, owned and edited by Marcus "Brick" Pomeroy. During the Civil War, Pomeroy was known as a Copperhead, gaining national notoriety by calling for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Pomeroy was an influential voice in the Greenback Party and within Wisconsin's Union Greenback Labor Party.Frank Klement, "Brick Pomeroy: Copperhead and Curmudgeon," Wisconsin Magazine of History 35, no. 2 (1951–52), 106–13, 156–57.
Taylor became editor of the La Crosse Evening Star (1885–1886) and owner/editor of the Wisconsin Labor Advocate (1886-ca. 1887), both of which claimed to be the voice of the Knights of Labor, the La Crosse County Workingmen's Party, and the Wisconsin State People's Party (also known as the Wisconsin Union Labor Party).Mouser, Black La Crosse, 131-36.
Taylor was politically active at the city, county, state, and national levels while living in La Crosse. As editor of the La Crosse Evening Star, he supported the administration of Frank "White Beaver" Powell, who served two terms as mayor of La Crosse. He was first elected as an independent (with no party affiliation) and, for his second term, as the champion of the city's Workingmen's Party.Eric Sorg, Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: The Life of White Beaver Powell, Buffalo Bill's Blood Brother (Austin, Texas: Eakin Press, 2002), 81.
Taylor was Secretary (1885–1886) of the La Crosse Workingmen's Party (both city and county) and one of the founders of the Wisconsin People's Party in (1886), serving as its State Secretary (1886–1887). He represented the state party at the Cincinnati Conference of Union Labor (February 1887) and became an advocate of Union Labor in Wisconsin (1887). Taylor's Wisconsin Labor Advocate was the official voice of Wisconsin's labor party in 1887.Mouser, Black La Crosse, 131-36.
Taylor's rapid rise in La Crosse's and Wisconsin's labor movement drew attention to his race at a time when the nation was reevaluating its racial attitudes. His opponents in the labor movement increasingly reminded him that he was black. Taylor returned their racial challenges in equal kind, and his support base within La Crosse's predominantly white community collapsed.Wisconsin Labor Advocate (available online), July 2, 1887, p.4.
Iowa period Taylor claimed that he "went West" after he left La Crosse and before he appeared in Oskaloosa, Iowa in January 1891. The record is silent concerning his activities during these missing three years.
By the time he surfaced in Iowa, Taylor had affiliated with the Republican Party. He arrived in Iowa as a community organizer and a Republican Party promoter. His focus changed from "labor" to "race" in a time when the nation was increasingly focused on the issues of race and the "Negro Problem." In this two-decade period, Taylor owned and operated a newspaper (the Negro Solicitor) and a farm, served two terms as a local Justice of the Peace (judge), transitioned from Republican to Democrat to Independent and back to Democrat, and served as a policeman. He also was the head of the Negro Bureau in the national Democratic Party (1900–1904) and the candidate of the National Negro Liberty Party for the office of president of the United States in 1904.
Taylor married Cora (née Cooper) Buckner on August 25, 1894. Cora was sixteen years younger than he and brought a child to the marriage. That child was mentioned only once in the record. Buckner was a typist and essayist who edited the Negro Solicitor (1893–1898) when Taylor was most active in politics at the state and national levels.Article written by Cora Taylor There were no known children to this marriage.
When Taylor moved from Oskaloosa to manage a lead mine at Coalfield, Iowa in 1900, and then to operate a farm near Hilton and Albia, Iowa after 1900, Cora refused to leave Oskaloosa. Their marriage ended in divorce.Mouser, For Labor, Race, and Liberty, 102. During this phase as a farmer, Taylor also studied law and served two terms as a "justice of the peace."Oskaloosa (Iowa) Herald, July 28, 1904, p.7.
No known copies of Taylor's Negro Solicitor survived, except for scattered articles reprinted in other newspapers or found in scrapbooks. Taylor published the Negro Solicitor as an Independent Republican paper in 1892–1893, and as a Democratic Party paper in 1893–1898. Taylor revived the Negro Solicitor for four to six months when he moved to Ottumwa, Iowa in 1904. Taylor also wrote articles for the Sunday Des Moines Leader in 1898.
Taylor's period as an Independent Republican (a Negrowump) was short-lived. Iowa's Republican leadership envisioned Taylor as someone who could speak the language of labor and who could keep Iowa's black coal and lead miners loyal to the party that had liberated them from slavery. Within sixteen months of his arrival in Iowa, however, Taylor abandoned the Iowa Republican Party for an independent course that emphasized racial solidarity rather than party membership.
National politics
In 1892, Taylor was positioned to play a major role as an Independent Republican. He, along with Frederick Douglass and Charles Ferguson, carried recommendations from Black Independent Republicans to the Platform Committee of the National Republican Party. That committee rejected all of their recommendations, and Taylor, in response, published a scathing "National Appeal, addressed to the American Negro and the Friends of Human Liberty."Murphy Library That "Appeal" effectively ended any role that he might have hoped to play within the state or national party.
Taylor's activities at the state level primarily focused within leagues and associations that claimed to be non-partisan. These included state leagues that affiliated with the National Afro-American League (NAAL), the National Afro-American Council (NAAC), and the National Colored Men's Protective League (NCMPL). These leagues served as black-only forums for discussing problems peculiar to the race – ideally in a non-partisan and non-confrontational setting. They also included the Iowa Colored Congress, the Iowa Knights of Pythias of North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, and Prince Hall Masons.