Robert Brown Elliott

Robert Brown Elliott is generally held to have been born on August 11, 1842, in Liverpool, England, though the record is not settled — his modern biographer Peggy Lamson favors Liverpool, while contemporary accounts placed his birth in Boston. His parents were of West Indian descent, their precise origin now unknown. Little of his early life is documented with certainty, but he emerged in the United States a man of formidable learning, eloquent in speech and disciplined in argument.

By late 1867 Elliott had settled in South Carolina, and in 1868 he was admitted to the state bar and began practicing law. He rose swiftly in the political life of Reconstruction. In 1869 he was appointed assistant adjutant-general of the state, and he served in the South Carolina House of Representatives, helping to organize the young state's defenses against Klan violence.

Elected to the Forty-second Congress, Elliott took his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives on March 4, 1871, and won reelection to the Forty-third. There he became one of the era's most celebrated Black orators, most famously in his 1874 speech supporting the Civil Rights Bill, answering the arguments of former Confederates on the House floor. He resigned from Congress in 1874 and returned to South Carolina, where he served as Speaker of the state House of Representatives from 1874 to 1876.

As Reconstruction collapsed, his fortunes declined, and he died on August 9, 1884, in New Orleans. May his voice — raised for equal citizenship when it cost dearly to raise it — be remembered with honor.