NARRATOR: On March 4, 1873, 26-year-old John Roy Lynch walked up the steps to the U.S. Capitol.
A slave just ten years earlier, Lynch was the first African American from Mississippi to sit in the House of Representatives.
ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN: If you were in the United States in 1860, and someone told you that in less than a decade, African Americans would be liberated as slaves, they would serve in the Union army, the men would be given the right to vote, they would be elected to office, people would have really think you belonged in the lunatic asylum. This was an amazing set of transformations in a very, very short period.
NARRATOR: Lynch was born in northeast Louisiana, the son of an Irish father and an enslaved mother.
His father bought the family, but after he died Lynch and his mother were sold across the border to Natchez, Mississippi, in the heart of one of the richest cotton plantation areas in the South.
NELL PAINTER, HISTORIAN: John Roy Lynch grew up as a slave in Natchez, Mississippi. And as a slave in Natchez, Mississippi, he did not have access to education at all. He's a young man just as emancipation comes, with the Union forces that came down the Mississippi in the middle of the war. Very bright young man, and a fast learner.
NARRATOR: When the war ended, Lynch wasted no time pursuing the new opportunities that freedom brought with it.
He found a job working at a photography studio and soon was enrolled in one of the new evening schools in town. After only four months, he had learned to read and write.
READING, JOHN LYNCH: "Among the books that I carefully read and studied was one on parliamentary law, which I found to be of great advantage to me in after life. I kept myself posted on the current events of the day by reading newspapers and magazines. I was especially interested in the proceedings of Congress."
NARRATOR: Lynch's passion for politics soon catapulted him into the Mississippi legislature.
In 1870, he joined hundreds of black freshmen descending on legislatures across the South.
He was 22 years old.
FONER: Opportunities open to him which would have been inconceivable before this moment. He's talented, he's ambitious, he's intelligent, and he kind of moves into this vacuum there of political leadership, which is waiting for people like that.
NARRATOR: A strong supporter of political Reconstruction, Lynch believed the new governments had the power to rebuild a more equal South.
DAVID BLIGHT, HISTORIAN: He saw government as something that ought to be activist, as something that ought to be shaping people's lives, that ought to be protecting people. He saw government as the agent of the thing he wanted most, which was education. He wanted to establish public schools in Mississippi. And the first of them were created in Mississippi by the legislature when Lynch was in it.
NARRATOR: Lynch was a moderate, unlike Tunis Campbell. He believed blacks and whites should work together to build a new society out of the ashes of slavery.
After a successful stint in the Mississippi legislature, he won a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1873 -- one of seven black Congressmen to be elected that year.
Two years later, he would face one of his toughest legislative battles.
He pushed for the passage of a new Civil Rights bill that dealt with racial discrimination in public facilities.
CLARENCE WALKER, HISTORIAN: They wanted the right to go into places of public service, to ride on the trains, to be seated in restaurants, etc., and treated as other Americans. They did not want to do this because they wanted to be necessarily around white people, but that they saw this as part of the freedom that was attendant upon being a citizen of the United States.
READING, JOHN LYNCH: "If this unjust discrimination is to be longer tolerated by the American people... then I can only say with sorrow and regret that our boasted civilization is a fraud; our institutions a failure; our social system a disgrace; and our religion a complete hypocrisy."
NARRATOR: Lynch's speech helped get the Civil Rights Bill passed. But on his return to Mississippi to campaign for re-election, he found the state immersed in violent chaos.
The Democrats, determined to regain control of the state government, set out to use intimidation and murder to keep black men away from the polls.
Lynch was able to hold on to his seat -- the only Republican, black or white, to be elected to Congress from Mississippi that year.
He won one more term and remained an active spokesman for the rights of Southern blacks, calling on the federal government and the Republican Party to confront lynching and electoral fraud in the Jim Crow South.
At 50, he left politics. He would go on to pursue different careers, joining the Army as a paymaster and practicing as a lawyer in Chicago.
Lynch spent the last years of his life trying to correct the negative view of Reconstruction that had become accepted by most Americans by the early 1900s.
In 1913, he wrote The Facts of Reconstruction, an autobiographical defense of the period.
PAINTER: The Facts of Reconstruction is an interesting book because it refutes the prevailing view of Reconstruction as this terrible moment of Negro misrule and so forth. White supremacist ideology of the late 19th and early 20th century portrayed Reconstruction as a terrible time. Nothing to recommend it. Awful, awful, awful. What Lynch tried to show was what had happened for the good, in terms of public schooling, in terms of infrastructure (railroads), starting to bring the South into the 19th century, so to speak. But his view of Reconstruction didn't start to prevail until after the Civil Rights Era of the 1950s and 60s.
NARRATOR: John Roy Lynch died in Chicago in 1939. He was 92-years-old.
It wasn't until 1987, more than a hundred years after Lynch's last term in Washington, that Mississippi elected another black representative to the U.S. Congress.
