On this day in Black history in 1857, George Edwin Taylor, the first ever Black candidate to run for president, was born in Little Rock, Arkansas.
In 1904, he ran for president as a member of the National Negro Liberty Party, formerly known as the “Ex-Slave Practitioners Assembly,” founded in his hometown. It was an independent pro-Black political organization that featured the major platforms of reparations, universal suffrage, desegregation of the military, anti-lynching legislation and pensions for the formerly enslaved.
Taylor only received less than 2,000 votes due to a number of complications, but still had the belief that a pro-Black political party that could mobilize the Black vote was the only applicable way for African Americans to leverage their political power. His ideals have lived on through the Freedom Party and the Black Panther Party.
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