The lost congressman: What happened to Jeremiah Haralson?
https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/in-depth/news/2020/02/26/jeremiah-haralson-lost-congressman-alabama/2823015001/
The lost congressman
He was a slave at 18.
A state legislator at 24.
A congressman at 28.
And a prisoner at 48.
Jeremiah Haralson lived a remarkable life. Then he vanished.
Jeremiah Haralson listened as the ex-Confederate accused him of forgery. It was Feb. 13, 1877, and Haralson, a congressman from Selma, had testified to a U.S. Senate subcommittee about the violence and fraud that cost him his re-election to Congress from Alabama’s Black Belt.
Malcolm Graham, on hand to represent the state Democratic Party, dismissed Haralson’s descriptions of racial terror with a cynical languor. Local Democratic leaders told him no such intimidation occurred, and these cursory denials satisfied the former Confederate congressman.
So Graham tried to make Haralson the criminal. During questioning, Graham asked Haralson about the testimony of another witness who claimed that Haralson had forged an election ticket to get votes in Lowndes County.
“He said there were 163 votes cast for you there, and that there would not have been one if the voters had not been imposed upon by a counterfeit ticket you had circulated there,” Graham said.
Haralson could recite precinct names and vote totals from memory. Lowndes County was not strong for him. That was true. But people there knew Haralson: The son of a prominent Lowndes County planter once held him in bondage.
“I have a few personal friends in the county, you know, old man,” the former slave told the former defender of slavery. “There are a good many there that know me, and they vote for me on personal grounds.”
This was Jeremiah Haralson: blunt, fearless and independent. A kinder country would have embraced him as everything America dreams of. A survivor of the physical and spiritual torture of the nation’s gravest sin, Haralson had the bravery to defy his former tormentors, teaching himself how to read and write and using his natural gifts to go from chattel slavery to the halls of Congress in a little over a decade. Haralson completed his term in Congress a month before his 31st birthday.
His confrontation with Malcolm Graham should have been an early moment of triumph in a long, courageous political career. But Haralson was a black man, and his success placed him in danger. It inspired the envy of venal men who resorted to corruption and violence to end a brief experiment with multiracial democracy and finish Haralson’s public life, which would have thrived in a just nation. He was the last African-American elected to Congress from Alabama until 1992.
Nearly 20 years after his exchange with Graham on that February day, Haralson walked into a prison in upstate New York, and out of history.
He vanished from newspaper accounts and official records. His grave, if it exists, is unknown.
Haralson’s official congressional biography says wild animals killed him in Colorado in 1916. But research by the Montgomery Advertiser raises questions about the story, and uncovered a trial that provides the last known evidence of Haralson on the face of the Earth.
Sold at least once as a child, Haralson learned to read and write when he was 19 years old. An orator with a “ringing voice,” he served five years in the Alabama Legislature, helping build and expand the state’s public education system while fighting for civil rights. He crossed paths with presidents, senators and generals. Allies cheered his agility in debate; enemies who viciously attacked Haralson in crude and racist terms learned not to underestimate his intelligence.
But Haralson was no somber crusader for right. He coupled his serious aims with a well-developed sense of irony. Frederick Douglass, who heard Haralson speak in New Orleans in 1872, wrote shortly after that Haralson was “a man of real solid sense” who had “humor enough in him to supply a half dozen circus clowns.” During his 1877 Senate testimony, Graham asked the congressman whether a local activist was a Democrat. Haralson replied: “He is dead now. He is not anything.”
He could confront contemporary racism with exceptional bravery. In an 1876 campaign speech in Alabama, Haralson mocked white assumptions about black sexuality. He said he would never marry a white woman, because “no rich white woman would have him, and he would not marry a poor white woman.”
Haralson was also complicated. He happily attacked fellow Republicans in the short-sighted factional wars that destroyed the Alabama GOP in the 1870s. Hoping to hold the votes of white Republicans, Haralson opposed the integration of public schools, a stand that put him at odds with most African-Americans. Haralson also made an ill-advised political race in 1884 that may have ended up hurting a Republican incumbent.
Taken whole, Haralson’s life shows the opportunities available to talented African-American politicians after the Civil War; the difficult choices they faced, and the violent and fraudulent manner in which whites took power from them.
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