James E. O’Hara

James Edward O'Hara was born on February 26, 1844, in Manhattan, New York City, the son of an Irish immigrant father and a West Indian mother of mixed race. While he was still a child, his family moved to the Caribbean, living across St. Croix, St. Thomas, and Jamaica before he returned to New York as a young man. This Atlantic upbringing gave him a rare, cosmopolitan grounding for a Black American of his generation.

In 1862, during the Civil War, O'Hara traveled to Union-occupied eastern North Carolina alongside missionaries, and there he cast his lot with the freedpeople of the South. He studied law at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and was admitted to the North Carolina bar in 1873, becoming the third Black lawyer in the state. He built a busy practice in Enfield, in Halifax County, and became a fixture in Republican politics.

In 1882 O'Hara was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina's Second Congressional District — the majority-Black "Black Second" — the second Black man to represent the state in Congress and the first elected after Reconstruction's collapse. He served in the Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth Congresses, from 1883 to 1887. An untiring worker, he labored for his constituents both Black and white and pressed for equal accommodations for African Americans on public transportation.

He later moved his practice to New Bern, where his son joined his firm, and died there on September 15, 1905. James Edward O'Hara stood in the nation's highest legislature at the very hour the doors were closing on Black political power — and he held that ground with honor. May his steadfastness be remembered.