by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Robert Charles O’Hara Benjamin came to Los Angeles late in 1887 and became the Angel City’s first Black practicing attorney and we’ve been tracing some of his remarkable and complex life and career prior to his settling here. Part one ended in 1881, as Benjamin, admitted to practice in Memphis ended up in Alabama and then abruptly left, amid a charge of fraud, for Kansas and other locations, with a warning to fellow members of the African-American fraternal order, the International Order of Immaculates, to avoid giving him money purportedly collected for the organization.
By March 1882, Benjamin turned up in Evansville, Indiana, in the southwestern section of the Hoosier State bordering Kentucky, where that city’s Journal of the 8th reported that the lawyer, “late of Memphis, Tennessee,” recently settled “and is the first attorney of color in the city.” The next day’s edition of the Lafayette Journal and Courier, that town being northwest of Indianapolis, cited the Evansville Tribune for a detailed biography of Benjamin, who was recently in Lafayette “with a band of singers trying to raise funds to build a college in Alabama”—don’t forget that association with a choral group when we get to the Los Angeles part of the story.
Moreover, the Journal and Courier reminded its readers that Benjamin “was an eloquent speaker as well as a clever gentleman.” When it came to his past, however, the Evansville paper recounted a different path than what appeared five years later in Men of the Mark, which formed the basis of much of what was believed to be known about the lawyer and journalist. While it was stated that Benjamin “is one of the few of his race who have been blessed with rare educational opportunities,” it shared that,
He was born in New York and started to school at an early age and graduated at Lincoln College in Pennsylvania at the age of 16 years. After graduating he served a term in the New York postoffice [sic] and then removed South, where he taught school, edited a newspaper and lectured.
Beyond the statement that Benjamin was said to have been born in New York (recall, though, that he was naturalized in 1876, so the St. Kitts birthplace seems to be true), Lincoln University is a Historically Black College and University (HBCU), located southwest of Philadelphia and near the borders with Maryland and Delaware, but we’ll see that he later claimed to be a graduate of two other American universities. Moreover, his graduation would have been in 1871, but the letter carrier job in New York City was five years later, though it is true that, once he headed to the South, he taught, worked in journalism and was a frequent speaker.
The news account went on to paraphrase some notable comments by Benjamin, including that conditions for African-Americans in Southern cities “were all right,” because “the colored man has ample opportunities for advancement and the full protection of the law,” though think back to his New York City experience in 1873, assuming that incident from part one happened to him. The remarks continued that,
But in the interior the black man is treated about as he was twenty-five years ago [during the waning days of slavery]. By a system of loans and notes, the black man is kept without any money, and no matter how good a crop he has raised [as a sharecropper], at the end of the year he finds that he has worked for the land owner who keeps the country store, and has nothing to show for it but food and clothes, just what he got when a slave.
Here, again, Benjamin expresses a sound viewpoint of the experiences of African-Americans in the South. After stating that he’d been lecturing in Lafayette and Greencastle, southwest of Indianapolis, the piece concluded “he is not green in the law” due to his admittance to practice at Memphis and practicing there and at Louisville,” while it was remarked that, “there being a large colored population here who deal in the law to a considerable extent an intelligent lawyer of their own color may hope to acquire a very lucrative practice.” In fact, this is an interesting statement to make, given the attorney’s frequent relocations.
The Journal of 5 May published a notice by the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion, also known as the Bridwell Chapel, in which the secretary provided various news items, including that “will the readers also remember that this church recommended the attorney at law, R.C.O. Benjamin to the people of Evansville, having induced him to come here.”
Just over two weeks later, the Indianapolis Leader briefly recorded that the lawyer, also associated with the Evansville Chronicle, passed through the capital city on his way to Toledo for the funeral of an unnamed brother, said to have died in Montreal, Canada. It does not appear, though, that Benjamin returned to Indiana and, by early September, he was in Pittsburgh. That city’s Post-Gazette of the 8th reported on the reconstitution of the Grand Central Marching Club, which was an organization for Black Republican voters.
Benjamin was invited to deliver an address, likely leaving a considerable impression on his hearers and in which,
He spoke at considerable length, reverting to the torturing of the negro race over a thousand years ago when they were the most progressive men, and of the time when they sank to almost nothing, but now it behooves them to take their rightful place once more in the affairs of the world. There seems to be a deep seated determination to allow the negro no show for anything, except when the privilege of franchise [voting] is wanted then they are all. He had lived most of this time in the South where he practiced law and edited a newspaper and had been fired at and wounded and beaten for upholding the rights of his race.
Just before the midterm elections, Benjamin spoke at an “Independent Republican” gathering at Oxford, a town just west of Lincoln University, where the Pittsburgh resident was joined by another well-known African-American lecturer, Paul J. Carson, with a possible appearance by Robert Purvis, a prominent mixed-race abolitionist in Philadelphia and figure in the Underground Railroad. He also appeared at Philadelphia’s Liberty Hall at a “Grand Mass Meeting” to support Republican challenger, General L.H. Warren, against the G.O.P. incumbent Henry H. Bingham, who won the election and served over three decades in Congress.
The day after Christmas, the Intelligencer of Wheeling, West Virginia, a key point along the National Road, ran a notice for a “Grand Demonstration by the Representative Colored Men of West Virginia, assisted by leading colored men from other States” at the city’s Academy of Music. One of the featured speakers was Benjamin, described as a “poet, lawyer, and the most eloquent orator of the colored race in the United States.”
By early 1883, still in Pittsburgh, Benjamin, who was named among the directors of a proposed Black-owned North Carolina railroad, was the editor of the Colored Citizen, an independent newspaper, but he began to get considerable press in Washington, D.C. because of his association with that city’s Black newspaper, the Bee, edited by William Calvin Chase, who was also an attorney, as well as his advocacy of an independent movement in terms of politics. This essentially involved rejecting a total loyalty to the Republican Party because of its role in ending slavery and pursuing objectives to advance African-American interests regardless of party identification or preference.
Benjamin was in the nation’s capital and penned a lengthy missive to the 17 February edition of the Bee, in which it was also reported that he was seeking to be admitted to practice before the Supreme Court (this did not, it appear, happen) and that “he has an appointment in the West under advisement,” though what this was is not known.
His letter concerned the independent movement as he understood it in Pennsylvania and observed that Robert Purvis, mentioned above, sued that paper because of statements Chase made about Purvis’ “infidelity” to the G.O.P. He detailed his views of the main figures who were part of the independent movement, including Purvis and William Still, another prominent Philadelphian with abolition and the Underground Railroad and owner of the aforementioned Liberty Hall. Excepting Still, though, Benjamin told the paper that the others, including Purvis, were in the movement for notoriety, money and the defeat of mainstream Republicans, in that order, with Purvis concerned about the latter.
Benjamin professed that his main interest was in labor and in fair wages for Black workers, while he also sought to eliminate “boss rule” in Republican Party operations, but he was indignant that some of the attitudes of so-called independents led some African-Americans to think they were stumping for the Democrats. An example took place in Chester, Pennsylvania, where enraged Black residents “accumulated rotten eggs to give us a warm reception, while he also chastised Purvis for not owning up to his role in the independent movement, adding that “all public men are open to public criticism” and “the old gentleman,” Purvis then being about 70, “made the biggest mistake of his life.”
The Bee of 3 March quoted the African-American newspaper, the New York Globe, which tore into Benjamin for his independent views and castigated his “malicious mutilation of grammar and . . . cool recital of his own corrupt and venal purposes.” The paper continued, “we advise Mr. Benjamin to keep out of the newspapers” as well as to “place his head under the faucet of an ice-cooler until his muddled brain coagulates” because “he is certainly addle-pated.”
Two weeks later, the Bee again cited the Globe‘s description of Benjamin as “one of the spiciest of our exchanges,” or papers that shared material, and that he was “a lawyer and scholar, and, as he forcibly puts it, a man ‘not to be gagged by bosses and machines.” It also quoted from the Afro-American, which wrote, with some sharpness as it skewered Benjamin,
The Bee should follow the bright example of the [Chicago] Conservator, and get up a chart of R.C.O. Benjamin, the poet, lawyer, orator, metaphysician, painter, editor, tragedian, politician, etc. It would add much to the chart to have the world’s renowned Benjamin appear in a different attitude in each title, Luckily, the gentleman has enough cheek to permit a thousand views of it. A chart of this sort would create much enthusiasm among the six million colored people of this country, who have yet to learn that there is a R.C.O. Benjamin.
The week prior, the Bee informed readers that it was establishing a branch in Baltimore with Benjamin as its representative. By the end of the month, however, he left for Charlottesville, Virginia (where the 2017 “Unite The Right” white supremacist rally was held) where the Richmond Dispatch of the 30th briefly noted that he was looking to apply for a license to practice and that “he is a man of good address, and has received a college education.”
The 4 April edition of the Washington [D.C.] Critic and Record, though, reported that “the first colored applicant for [a] license to practice law at the bar of Albemarle County, Va., is B.C.O. [sic] Benjamin.” Two months later, he was named the principal instructor of a training school for African-American teachers in Staunton, the hometown of future President Woodrow Wilson, though it is not known how long he remained with the institution. The 24 July issue of the Staunton Spectator reported that Benjamin was given a license to practice and that “this is the first time that the Staunton bar has been honored with a colored member.”
Three days later, the Vindicator of that city recognized this distinction, but added a notable comment to Benjamin’s behavior when he came to town:
The attorney made a good impression on his arrival here from Charlottesville; he went to the Virginia Hotel and instead of starting a civil rights circus quietly informed the proprietor that he knew the customs in Virginia, that he was not desirous to make himself conspicuous, and that separate accommodations, if good, would be perfectly satisfactory. The accommodations provided for him were equal to the good impression he had made. After all it is very likely that if the colored man went less on his “rights” and more on his merits he would not find it so hard a road to travel.
Yet, the account also stated that Benjamin was a graduate of Howard University, one of the most prominent of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and it would seem that the information could have come from Benjamin, probably through his application. Recall that it was earlier remarked that he had a degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and his biography claimed he went to Trinity College at Oxford University in England.
Despite the Vindicator‘s approval of how Benjamin acted when he arrived in Staunton, in keeping with how most white people thought how African-Americans should behave, the city’s Valley Virginian of 15 November published a set of resolutions from “a very large meeting of colored citizens” held at a church concerning the Danville Massacre of the 3rd. The riot took place as white Democrats sought to take control of governing the Black-majority town that previously had a biracial party in power and four African-Americans were killed.
Benjamin was one of a half-dozen speakers who gave “plain but conservative addresses” and one of a quintet of the committee that issued the resolutions. The group condemned the massacre and declared the first Sunday in December as a day of mourning, while also adding “we urge our people to deport themselves with propriety, dignity, forbearance and patience in the future as in the past” and submitting the matter “to a just God and the judgment and conscience of an enlightened public sentiment to rectify in due time.”
The mayor of Danville was praised for the immediate arrest of a white man for the unprovoked shooting and killing of a Black man “and we look to the Mayor to see that justice is done.” Significantly, the resolutions ended with the appointment of Benjamin and four different men as a committee “to confer with similar committees in other parts of the State, for the purpose of taking into consideration the feasibility of emmigrating [sic] from this State to other sections of the country.”
The next part of this post will find Benjamin immigrating from Virginia for another matter of accused fraud, but check back with us tomorrow for that.
I must admit that, while reading this post, I was genuinely puzzled by R.C.O. Benjamin’s ever-shifting locations and contradictory accounts.
Hi Larry, there is, of course, more to the story, so stay tuned as we continue with the post!