Jefferson F. Long

Jefferson Franklin Long was born into slavery on the third of March 1836 in Knoxville, Crawford County, Georgia, the son of an enslaved mother and a white father whose name was not recorded. By the 1840 census he was listed in the household of James C. Loyd, a Knoxville tailor. When the Loyd family moved to Macon in the 1850s, they took the young Long with them and later sold him to the businessman Edwin Saulsbury.

Set to work at the tailor's trade, Long mastered it with such skill that he was soon running a shop. Denied any schooling, he taught himself to read and write in part by watching the typesetters at a Macon newspaper set their copy. By the close of the Civil War, the emancipated Long had built himself into a successful merchant tailor in Macon.

In the ferment of Reconstruction, Long became a leading Republican organizer among Georgia's freedpeople, helping establish a branch of the Freedman's Savings Bank and convening gatherings that pressed for public education and fairer terms for sharecroppers. Elected to Congress in December 1870, he served Georgia's Fourth District from January 16 to March 3, 1871 — the first African American to represent Georgia in the U.S. House.

On the first of February 1871, Long rose and became the first African American to speak on the floor of the House of Representatives, opposing an amnesty bill that would have restored former Confederates to power without safeguards for the newly freed. He returned to Macon and his trade, and died there of influenza on the fourth of February 1901. May the tailor who dressed himself in the language of freedom, and spoke it first, be honored without end.