Today in our History – July 6, 1869 - Joseph Dennis Harris, the first Black candidate for lieutenant governor, defeated by a vote in Virginia.

GM – LIF – Today’s American Champion was a free-born physician, ran as the lieutenant gubernatorial candidate for the Republican Party's radical faction in the election of 1869.

He entered public life late in the 1850s, advocating African American repatriation to the Caribbean. His interest in tropical diseases led him into medicine, and he became a doctor in 1864. His medical work for the U.S. Army settled him in Virginia.

Politically active and known for his intelligence, he received the Republicans' nomination for lieutenant governor in the first statewide election under the Constitution of 1869. His multiracial background played a role in splitting the party that year.

A breakaway group known as the True Republicans received the tacit support of the Conservative Party and carried the election. He remained active in medicine and civil rights, living in South Carolina and Virginia, until a mental breakdown in 1876. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1884.

Remember - "solely and purely because of the prejudices which exist against my color and race. On these terms I can afford to be relieved; on these terms I can afford to suffer both insult and injury. But whether any one can afford to insult and injure another on account of color, is a question which time will determine." - Joseph Dennis Harris

Today in our History – July 6, 1869 - Joseph Dennis Harris, the first Black candidate for lieutenant governor, Dr. J.D. Harris, defeated by a vote of 120,068 to 99,600 in Virginia.

Joseph Dennis Harris was born free around 1833 of mixed-race ancestry in Cumberland County, North Carolina, and was the son of Jacob Harris and Charlotte Harris. His brothers included Cicero Richardson Harris, who became a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and one of his sisters became the mother of civil rights activist Esther Georgia Irving Cooper.

After his father's death in the 1840s, the family moved to Ohio early in the 1850s, eventually settling in Cleveland. Late in November 1858, Harris joined antislavery activists, including John Mercer Langston, at the Convention of the Colored Citizens of Ohio, held in Cincinnati.

Harris served as a secretary of the convention and was named to the executive board of the newly organized Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society, for which he served as a lecturer in 1859 and vice president in 1860.

Later that year he traveled to the Caribbean in search of sites suitable for settlement by African Americans who wished to leave the country. In 1860, under the name J. Dennis Harris, he published A Summer on the Borders of the Caribbean Sea, which described his trip to Haiti and nearby islands and advocated the establishment of a settlement for free blacks with the support and protection of the American government. The book received a long and favorable notice in the New York Evening Post on October 9, 1860.

In June 1864, Harris became an acting assistant surgeon assigned to the U.S. Army's Balfour Hospital in Portsmouth. During his tenure there his responsibilities increased from managing one ward with 100 patients to managing three wards. After the American Civil War (1861–1865) ended Harris moved to the army's Howard's Grove Hospital, near Richmond, which treated African American soldiers and freed people.

On October 1, 1865, Harris joined the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (better known as the Freedmen's Bureau), and began working at its Fredericksburg hospital in December 1865.

He remained there until November 1867, after which he became acting assistant surgeon at the Freedmen's Bureau hospital at Fort Monroe, in Hampton.

On May 13, 1868, Harris married Elizabeth Worthington, who was the daughter of a white Presbyterian minister and may have been an American Missionary Association teacher in schools for freedpeople in eastern Virginia and North Carolina. They had one daughter, who under her married name, Worthie Harris Holden, published a volume of religious poetry, and one son, Thoro Harris, who published numerous hymnal and gospel songbooks.

While in Virginia Harris became active in politics, beginning with his signature on the call for a national convention of African Americans published in the Boston Liberator of September 16, 1864. The meeting was held three weeks later, although he did not attend.

Harris probably attended some of the local and state conventions that African American men in Virginia held in the years immediately following the Civil War, and he attended and briefly spoke at a Richmond conference of black and white Republicans in August 1867.

Harris attended the Republican Party state convention in Petersburg on March 9 and 10, 1869, which nominated candidates for statewide office. The general election, scheduled for July 6, 1869, was to be the first in which African American men voted for statewide officers and members of the General Assembly.

The convention nominated for governor Henry Horatio Wells, who had been serving as provisional governor under military appointment, and for attorney general the young incumbent elected to that office in the Restored government of Virginia in 1863, Thomas Russell Bowden. Lewis Lindsey, one of the African American delegates who had served in the Constitutional Convention of 1867–1868, proposed Harris for lieutenant governor.

Several other African Americans, including Thomas Bayne, who served in the convention as well, also endorsed Harris as loyal, well educated, and well qualified. The prospect of having a black candidate on the ticket appealed strongly to the black delegates and to some of the radical white Republicans, and these supporters united to defeat a white man and give Harris the nomination.

Harris's race instantly became one of the most-discussed aspects of the campaign. He acknowledged in an address to a state convention of African Americans on May 28 that some white Republicans would refuse to support the ticket as long as he was on it.

Harris also advised black men to rely on themselves and not trust white men who had not clearly demonstrated their devotion to the interests of African Americans. Opposition newspapers condemned Harris because he had married a white woman, with the implication that if the radical ticket prevailed, interracial marriage would be part of Virginia's future.

Those opposed to the ticket also raised the possible scenario that if the radicals won the election, the General Assembly could elect Wells to the U.S. Senate, leaving Harris to succeed him automatically as governor.

The True Republicans won all three statewide offices, with each candidate receiving between 54 and 55 percent of the votes. Harris lost by a vote of 120,068 to 99,600 to John Francis Lewis, who had been an outspoken Unionist in 1861. Harris trailed Wells and Bowden by only about 1,600 votes. Each received between 45 and 46 percent of the votes cast, and all three certainly received votes from many white Virginia men.

By May 1872 he was working as a physician treating the poor in Washington, D.C. From April 1 to August 1, 1873, he served as ward physician at Freedmen's Hospital at Howard University and thereafter maintained a private practice in the city.

In the summer of 1876 he had a mental breakdown and in September 1877 was declared of unsound mind. Harris was admitted to the Government Hospital for the Insane (later Saint Elizabeth's Hospital), in Washington, D.C., where he died on December 25, 1884.

He was buried in Graceland Cemetery, in Washington, and reinterred in the city's Woodlawn Cemetery in January 1898. Research more about this great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!