Lynch, John Roy, 1847-1939

John Roy Lynch (September 10, 1847 – 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. Lynch was born into slavery in Louisiana and became free in 1863 under the Emancipation Proclamation. During Reconstruction, Lynch became a prominent political leader in Mississippi. 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. He was among the first generation of African Americans from the South elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served in the 44th, 45th, and 47th Congresses. In 1884, he was elected temporary chair of the Republican National Convention and delivered the convention's keynote address. After Democrats regained power in the Mississippi legislature, they disenfranchised much of the majority-black electorate by raising barriers to voter registration. Lynch then studied law and was admitted to the Mississippi bar in 1896. Seeing the effects of disenfranchisement, Lynch left the state and returned to Washington, D.C. to practice law. 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. After retiring, Lynch moved to Chicago, where he lived for more than two decades and was active in law and real estate. Beginning with the end of federal Reconstruction in 1877, Lynch wrote and published four books analyzing the political situation in the South. 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.