U.S. Representative Rev. Richard H. Cain

U.S. Representative Rev. Richard H. Cain (1825-1887), minister and politician. Richard Harvey Cain was born in Greenbrier County, Virginia (now West Virginia), the son of free parents, and grew up in Gallipolis, Ohio. Cain learned to read and write in Sunday School and worked as a barber before attending divinity school in Missouri. He was licensed to preach by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844, but he was frustrated by the denomination’s racial policies and so moved to the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). In 1859, he received his first ministerial assignment in Muscatine, Iowa, which had one of the first black churches founded west of the Mississippi River. He pastored a church in Brooklyn during the Civil War, and when the war ended he went to Charleston to help the recently freed slaves as superintendent of missions. His congregation grew to more than 4,000 members, and in the words of one biographer, “Church after church sprang into existence as if by magic under his charge.” He also operated a school for former slaves, edited the newspaper Missionary Record, and called for greater rights for African Americans in his 1868 article “Address to the People of South Carolina.” Black South Carolinians in fact did gain the right to vote that year, and Cain was nominated to serve as a delegate to the state constitutional convention. Many whites were so strongly opposed to his nomination and to any black political activity that his school was forced to close and there were several attempted attacks against his family and property; “He was compelled to have a bodyguard wherever he went,” his daughter later recalled. In response to the threats, Cain publicly declared that African Americans were “prepared to stand by their liberties...and see that the liberties of their children are guarded with sleepless vigilance. Let their foes be aware!”

He helped create a new state constitution with greater rights for African Americans, then earned election to the state legislature, where he became a strong advocate for racial equality and black economic empowerment. In 1869, he created a proposal to help former slaves purchase government land, and when the government failed to provide funding, he used his own money. The community known as Lincolnville prospered for several years but then failed when Cain was unable to keep up the mortgage payments. In 1870, he helped create the black-owned Enterprise Railroad and served as its president. Two years later, he became one of the first African Americans elected to the United States Congress, winning 71% of the vote in a four-way race. U.S. Congressman Cain focused his energies on passing a civil rights law to ban racial discrimination in restaurants, public transportation, and other venues. In several speeches before Congress, he described his own experience of being denied a train seat while traveling to Washington D.C. and stated that “There will be no real and enduring peace so long as the rights of any class of men are trampled under foot.”

During his second term, he introduced a bill to fund public schools through the sale of government land, arguing “The education of the nation is paramount, and should not be neglected…It is an accepted axiom, I believe everywhere, that the more intelligent the citizen is the better citizen he is.” By the mid-1870s, though, southern blacks were losing their hard-fought political rights due to racial violence and indifference by the federal government. Between 1871 and 1901 there were twenty-three African Americans in the U.S. House of Representatives, all in the Deep South. After African Americans lost the ability to vote in the South, there were no more black members of Congress anywhere in the country until the Great Migration helped launch the careers of black politicians in the urban North, and it was not until after the Civil Rights Movement that southern blacks returned to Congress. As part of this late 19th-century movement back towards white supremacy, Cain was not nominated for reelection in 1880. He briefly considered moving to Liberia but instead went to Texas, where he distanced himself from politics and focused on church affairs. He was elevated to the position of bishop and also served as president of Paul Quinn College, the oldest black university west of the Mississippi River. In 1884 he returned to Washington D.C., where he served as a bishop for that district until his death in 1887. Upon his passing, a group of fellow ministers and activists declared: “Full of mercy and good fruits he gave himself...He died in the Lord; ‘he rests from his labors; his works do follow him.’”

©David Brodnax, Sr.