Pinckney pinchback biography examples
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by Leslie D. Burke, MLIS (editorial support from Dr. Fari Nzinga andDr. Regina Stevens-Truss)
The Kalamazoo College Library subscribes to Accessible Archives, where in fall 2021, was published a white paper on Pinckney Benton Stewart (P.B.S.) Pinchback – the first Black Governor of the state of Louisiana!
Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (known by his contemporaries as P.B.S. Pinchback) was at the helm as the governor of the state of Louisiana — for only 30 days (from December 9, 1872 to January 13, 1873). During the contentious political struggles of the Reconstruction, P.B.S. Pinchback and the Republican party were embroiled in the debate around Negro rights, once the institution of slavery had been abolished through armed struggle. During that time period, Republicans were typically the anti-slavery party with the Democrats generally on the other side, and political corruption equally divided.
P.B.S. Pinchback was quite a character by all accounts, having both successes and failures in his life, with those that admired him and those that thought him somewhat of a scoundrel. Major William Pinchback (a plantation owner in Virginia) and an enslaved woman he loved named Eliza Stewart (an enslaved woman who was the child of a white father and an enslaved mot
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The Carpetbagger
His name seems pure invention —Pinckney B. S. Pinchback. It sounds so much like pinchbeck , dictionary-defined as “counterfeit or spurious,” that one suspects a joke by political enemies. But the name was genuine, and so was the man, and so was the record. Louisiana voters elected him to important public office at least five times, and for thirty-five days in December of 1872 and January of 1873 he was the governor of Louisiana. And that was a landmark—the highest official position in a state ever achieved by an American black man.
“Black,” that is, only in the language that lumps all those with any African blood under one color label. Actually Pinchback was a mulatto—”not darker than an Arab, less so than the Kanaka,” according to one reporter, with features “just perceptibly African.” He had, said another observer, a “comely figure” and was a “very Othello in appearance, with … good teeth, full jet-black beard and moustache,” dark eyes, small hands and feet, and a style of dress that showed “scrupulous neatness and good taste.” He was, by all testimony, eloquent, shrewd, courageous, and self-possessed and might have been taken, if he had walked into a fashionable restaurant, for a “wealthy créole island planter educated abroad.”
He was all that. In ad
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Pinckney Pinchback
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