Jeremiah Haralson

Jeremiah Haralson was born into slavery on April 1, 1846, on a plantation in Muscogee County, near Columbus, Georgia. As a child he was sold more than once, and in 1859 a Selma, Alabama lawyer named John Haralson purchased him. He remained enslaved until Alabama's ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 secured his freedom. Largely self-taught, he learned to read and write and grew into a preacher of striking power.

Freedom opened a public life. A gifted orator and debater, Haralson entered Reconstruction politics and won a seat in the Alabama House of Representatives (1870–1872), then the Alabama State Senate (1872–1874). In 1874 the people of Alabama's First Congressional District sent him to Washington, where he served in the Forty-fourth Congress of the United States House of Representatives from March 4, 1875, to March 3, 1877.

In Congress and at home he labored to defend the civil and political rights of the newly freed, standing against a resurgent Democratic order backed by intimidation, fraud, and violence that ultimately cost him re-election in 1876 and 1878. In later years he held federal clerkships and worked as a pension agent; in 1894 he was convicted of pension fraud and imprisoned.

His final chapter is uncertain: accounts place him in Colorado around 1916, reportedly killed while hunting near Denver, though no death record survives. Born owned by others, he rose to help write the nation's laws — a voice for his people that no chain could finally silence.