(They were prohibited from marrying by state law.) There he fell in love with Catherine and they became a couple, living together as man and wife. They settled in Zanesville, Ohio.Īs young men, Patrick and his older brother Edward Lynch moved South Patrick became an overseer at the Tacony Plantation. A young immigrant, Patrick Lynch had come to the United States with his family from Dublin, Ireland. John's father Patrick Lynch was the overseer on the plantation he had a common-law marriage with Catherine White. Under slavery law, the children of slave mothers were slaves, regardless of paternity. Born in Virginia, she was of mixed race, as were both of her parents, Robert and Elizabeth White. He was the third son of his mother Catherine White, who was enslaved. Lynch was born into slavery in 1847 on Tacony Plantation near Vidalia, Concordia Parish, Louisiana. The best known of these is The Facts of Reconstruction (1913), which argued against the prevailing view of the Dunning School, conservative white historians who downplayed African-American contributions and the achievements of the Reconstruction era. After retiring, Lynch moved to Chicago, where he lived for more than two decades and was active in law and real estate.īeginning with the end of federal Reconstruction in 1877, Lynch wrote and published four books analyzing the political situation in the South. He served in the United States Army during the Spanish–American War and for a decade into the early 1900s, achieving the rank of major. Seeing the effects of disenfranchisement, Lynch left the state and returned to Washington, D.C. Lynch then studied law and was admitted to the Mississippi bar in 1896. In 1884, he was elected temporary chair of the Republican National Convention and delivered the convention's keynote address.Īfter Democrats regained power in the Mississippi legislature, they disenfranchised much of the majority-black electorate by raising barriers to voter registration. House of Representatives and served in the 44th, 45th, and 47th Congresses. He was among the first generation of African Americans from the South elected to the U.S.

In 1873, Lynch was elected as the first African-American Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives he is considered the first Black man to hold this position in any state. During Reconstruction, Lynch became a prominent political leader in Mississippi. Lynch was born into slavery in Louisiana and became free in 1863 under the Emancipation Proclamation. John Roy Lynch (Septem– November 2, 1939) was an American writer, attorney, military officer, author, and Republican politician who served as Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives and represented Mississippi in the United States House of Representatives.

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