P. B. S. Pinchback

Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback was born in Macon, Georgia, on the tenth of May 1837, the son of an enslaved mother and her white master William Pinchback. He was educated at the Gilmore School in Cincinnati after his mother and the children were freed and moved north.

He served as a captain in the Union Army during the Civil War, raising a company of Black volunteers in Louisiana. After the war he settled in New Orleans, edited the New Orleans Louisianian newspaper, and entered Reconstruction politics. He served in the Louisiana state senate from 1868, as Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana from 1871, and — for thirty-five days from the ninth of December 1872 through the thirteenth of January 1873, while Governor Henry Clay Warmoth was undergoing impeachment proceedings — as the Acting Governor of Louisiana.

He was the first African American to serve as governor of an American state. The next would not occur until L. Douglas Wilder's election in Virginia in 1990, one hundred and seventeen years later.

He was elected to the United States Senate by the Louisiana legislature in 1873 and to the United States House of Representatives in 1872, but white Senate and House majorities refused to seat him in both cases on the basis of disputed election results. He continued in Louisiana politics through the 1880s and later moved to Washington, D.C., where he practiced law and ran the Bureau of Customs.

He died in Washington on the twenty-first of December 1921, age eighty-four.

He is honored here as the first African American to serve as a U.S. state governor.