He was born into slavery on the Tacony Plantation in Louisiana. He was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and moved to Natchez, Mississippi. There he learned how to read and write “by overhearing the lessons from a local White school across the alley from his job at a photography store.” In 1870, at the age of 22, he became part of Mississippi’s “first integrated legislature, helping ratify the 14th and 15th amendments, which guaranteed equal citizenship to formerly enslaved people and voting rights to Black men.”
Three years later, he “became speaker of the Mississippi House, the first Black man to hold that position in any state. A year later, he made history again, becoming the first Black member of the U.S. House from Mississippi.” In Congress, he “helped pass the last of Congress’s major civil rights bills during Reconstruction, banning discrimination in hotels, on trains and in all public accommodations.”
It wasn’t long after these extraordinary accomplishments that White “segregationists took back the state by force, forming militia groups that attacked integrated political meetings and kept Black voters from the polls.” And the incredible life’s work of John Roy Lynch was relegated to the backbench of history.
John Roy Lynch’s story and the accomplishments of Black people during the early days of Reconstruction have been systematically disparaged, diminished and dishonored. To combat disinformation about Reconstruction by White supremacists, Lynch, a writer, military officer, attorney, and lifelong Republican, wrote a book detailing some the accomplishments of Reconstruction. He also predicted that as time passed, burying the true history of the period would become even more pronounced.
Living in Chicago in 1913, John Roy Lynch’s book “The Facts of Reconstruction,” became one of the first histories of the era written by a Black leader who participated in the South’s transformation after the Civil War. And Lynch’s story is one among many being told in a new book titled “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It” by Ari Berman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). (All the above quotes come from Berman’s work.)
Minority Rule recounts the decades-long effort by reactionary White conservatives to undermine democracy and entrench their power―and the movement to stop them.
The book’s promotional materials note: “Through voter suppression, election subversion, gerrymandering, dark money, the takeover of the courts, and the whitewashing of history, reactionary White conservatives have strategically entrenched power in the face of a massive demographic and political shift.” Berman provides readers with a broad historical perspective and “on-the-ground reporting, chronicling how a wide range of antidemocratic tactics interact with profound structural inequalities in institutions like the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court to threaten the survival of representative government in America.”
Minority Rule “ exposes the long history of the conflict between White supremacy and multiracial democracy that has reached a fever pitch today―while also telling the inspiring story of resistance to these regressive efforts.”
In a recent Washington Post story titled “The formerly enslaved lawmaker who warned about rewriting Black history,” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/04/27/john-roy-lynch-black-history/), Berman wrote: “The histories of the era written by Lynch’s White contemporaries described the period as a tragic farce, not because multiracial democracy had been overturned so violently and abruptly, but because it had been attempted at all. Black Southerners were portrayed as ignorant and corrupt, undeserving of the benefits of citizenship and easily duped by greedy Northern ‘carpetbaggers’ and conniving Southern ‘scalawags.’”
According to Berman, “Seventy-four laws have been passed at the state level since 2021 limiting how race, sex and gender are taught in schools, a Washington Post investigation found (https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/04/education-laws-red-blue-divide/).
Three-fourths of the nation’s school-age students are now educated under state-level measures that either require more teaching on issues like race, racism, history, sex and gender, or which sharply limit or fully forbid such lessons, according to a sweeping Post review of thousands of state laws, gubernatorial directives and state school board policies. The restrictive laws alone affect almost half of all Americans ages 5 to 19.
John Roy Lynch wrote a number of articles challenging Reconstruction’s revisionists, especially James Ford Rhodes, an Ohio industrialist and amateur historian, who in the late 1880s “began publishing his highly popular, seven-volume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877,” Berman pointed out.
“No large policy in our country,” Rhodes wrote, “has ever been so conspicuous a failure as that of forcing universal negro suffrage upon the South.” Rhodes referred to Reconstruction as the “oppression of the South by the North.”
John Roy Lynch fought back, writing that Rhodes’ work: “so far as the Reconstruction period is concerned, … is not only inaccurate and unreliable but it is the most biased, partisan, and prejudiced historical work I have ever read.”
History is a complex and evolving interpretation of the past. Those doing the defining shape a country’s path forward. In this age of AI, dedicated misinformation shops, social media, book banning, the dark web, it does not take long to destroy shared understanding of the events that shape a people’s history. Voices such as John Roy Lynch’s are a critical part in preserving that shared understanding.