Politics and P.B.S. Pinchback were synonymous during the Reconstruction era.

Politics and P.B.S. Pinchback were synonymous during the Reconstruction era. Credit: Mathew Benjamin Brady, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A Republican, Pinchback was president pro tempore of the Louisiana Senate, the state’s second Black lieutenant governor and the first Black governor in the United States, serving only 36 days. 

Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback was born on May 10, 1837 in Georgia. His father owned a plantation and his mother was formerly enslaved. 

“His father sent him to school in Cincinnati, Ohio, the abolitionist hub of the upper Midwest and the home of a growing community of free Black people and runaways,” 64 Parishes states. Pinchback was 11 when his father died. 

Still a boy, Pinchback worked on river and canal boats to support his family, which had fled to Cincinnati to avoid “being re-enslaved by white relatives who disinherited the mixed-race family.” 

He moved to New Orleans in 1862.

During the Civil War, according to the National Governors’ Association, Pinchback was captain of the all-Black 2nd Regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards. He entered politics in 1867 as a Louisiana Reconstruction Convention delegate.

According to the “Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895, delegate Pinchback “worked to create a state-supported public school system and wrote the provision guaranteeing racial equality in public transportation and licensed businesses.”

Because Pinchback favored “practicality over political beliefs,” 64 Parishes states, he was “a target of suspicion by the city’s Afro-Creole political elite — a group that Pinchback would never belong to — but he became popular among newly empowered freedmen.”

After Reconstruction, Pinchback helped to create Southern University. He also had several positions at the U.S. Custom House and earned a law degree at Straight (now Dillard) University. 

Pinchback moved to New York City, then Washington, D.C., and practiced law before dying in 1921. He is buried in Metairie Ridge Cemetery outside of New Orleans.

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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Tammy C. Barney is an award-winning columnist who spent most of her career at two major newspapers, The Times-Picayune and The Orlando Sentinel. She served as a bureau chief, assistant city editor, TV...