For Labor, Race, and Liberty: George Edwin Taylor, His Run For the White House, and the Making of Black Independent Politics
| UW-L Author: | Bruce L. Mouser Professor Emeritus - History |
| Copyright: | 2012 |
| Publisher: | University of Wisconsin Press |
Mouser, Bruce L. For Labor, Race, and Liberty: George Edwin Taylor, His Run For the White House, and the Making of Black Independent Politics. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.
More than one hundred years before Barack Obama, George Edwin Taylor made presidential history. Born in the antebellum South to a slave and a freed woman, Taylor became the first African American ticketed as a political party’s nominee for president of the United States, running against Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. Orphaned as a child at the peak of the Civil War, Taylor spent several years homeless before boarding a Mississippi riverboat that dropped him in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Taken in by an African American farm family, Taylor attended a private school and eventually rose to prominence as the owner/editor of a labor newspaper and as a vocal leader in Wisconsin’s People’s Party.
Bruce L. Mouser follows Taylor’s life and career in Arkansas, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Florida, giving life to a figure representing a generation of African American idealists whose initial post-slavery belief in political and social equality in America gave way to the despair of the Jim Crow decades that followed.
About the Author
Bruce L. Mouser is professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. He has authored numerous articles on African and African-American history, with the latter focusing on either the African slave trade or black settlement in upper Mississippi River towns. He is a recognized authority on the history of commerce along the upper Guinea Coast before the imposition of colonialism. His most recent book, For Labor, Race, and Liberty: George Edwin Taylor, His Historic Run for the White House, and the Making of Independent Black Politics chronicles the life of the first Black American to run for the office of president of the United States.