Charles E. Nash

Charles Edmund Nash was born on the twenty-third of May 1844 at Opelousas, in the parish of Saint Landry, Louisiana. He came of age amid the currents of a South soon to be torn by civil war, received his early learning in the common schools, and took up the honest trade of a bricklayer in New Orleans, laying by hand the walls of the city that shaped him.

When the Civil War came, Nash answered its call. He enlisted in the Union Army, serving in Company A of the 82nd Regiment of United States Colored Troops. In the war's closing days, at the Battle of Fort Blakely in Alabama in 1865, he was gravely wounded and lost part of his right leg. He carried that sacrifice for the rest of his life, a soldier who had given his body for the freedom of his people.

In Reconstruction Louisiana he entered public life, and in 1874 he was elected as a Republican to the Forty-fourth Congress. Taking his seat on the fourth of March 1875, he became the only African American ever to represent the state of Louisiana in Congress during the Reconstruction era. He served a single term; the return of "Redeemer" Democratic power ended his bid for reelection in 1876. He would remain the state's sole Black congressman for more than a century.

After Washington, Nash returned to his trade as a bricklayer and later worked as a cigar maker, serving briefly as a postmaster in Saint Landry Parish. He died on the twenty-first of June 1913 in New Orleans. Let it be honored that a wounded soldier and a working man of his hands rose to speak for a whole people in the highest hall of the nation.