by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Robert Charles O’Hara Benjamin (1855-1900), the first practicing Black attorney in California and who was in Los Angeles from 1887 to 1889, was in Staunton, Virginia at the dawn of 1884, but maintained a much lower profile, or was just not mentioned as much in the press, as was the case the prior year.
The town’s Valley Virginian newspaper of 24 April reported that the peripatetic attorney, journalist and political activist left town and settled in the state capitol of Richmond, but it added that he “has fallen heir to a fortune of $17,000, mostly in real estate, in [the] West Indies” and that this was left by his mother’s grandfather, with a New York attorney hired to manage the estate.
A little over two months later, the Richmond Dispatch of 9 July ran an article on a meeting at the Third Street African Methodist Episcopal Church in the city of the National Colored Press Association. Benjamin, representing the Progressive American, published in New York City, opened the proceedings with a prayer and also was a member of a five-person committee to prepare an address to the assemblage.
Nothing else could be located about him, however, until mid-April 1885 when it was reported that he was charged and tried for fraud concerning the charging of a client for not quite $25 for services that were not rendered. The Staunton Vindicator of 24 April covered the case in some detail reporting that,
The complaint set forth that a son of Georgietta Eights, colored, stole some jewelry from Clara Robinson, colored. He was bailed and fled. The mother of the boy applied to Benjamin to get the matter fixed so that her boy might return. Benjamin told her one day that he had had the matter fixed and collected the fee of $23.25. It afterwards [was] proved that he had done nothing and the boy could not return. He had tried to do something to earn that fee, however, and that something was, according to the testimony of Clara Robinson, to prepare an affidavit for her to perjure herself by swearing to it, declaring that she was mistaken in her charge and had since found the jewelry where she had hidden it. Benjamin was sent to prison.
The conclusion of the piece stated that the attorney “is a native of the West Indies, is a fluent and good speaker,” was an Independent Republican in Pennsylvania and “is the author of a plan or ethnological map of the African race” and “has sold many maps.” One, of course, wonders why, if the lawyer inherited $17,000, a not insignificant sum for the time, he resorted, if the charge was true, to fraud over a small amount of money.
While Benjamin was convicted on the larceny charge, he was free on bail during the trial and then fled. The Vindicator of 3 July related that,
A Canadian minister writes that R.C.O. Benjamin . . . at present a fugitive from Richmond . . . is in Canada representing himself to be a preacher, collecting money for some charitable institution. The Canadian minister wants to know if Benjamin is a fraud.
As we’ve seen before, Benjamin previously was reported by an African-American-owned newspaper in Kansas to have been seeking money from fellow members of a fraternal society, so this allegation about his being a minister and seeking charitable donations seems to be in line with that earlier incident.
At Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, not far beyond the United States border from Buffalo and southwest of Toronto, the city’s Spectator of 20 July remarked on the trial of a man accused of a highway robbery “which R.C.O. Benjamin was subjected to recently.” A police sergeant told the court “that Benjamin had received a telegram . . . calling him to Guelph,” northwest of Hamilton “on business” but that “he had gone away and had not been heard of from since.” Moreover, the Guelph police chief answered a query by saying that Benjamin was not in that city, so the trial was postponed until he could be located.
The 19 February 1886 edition of the paper went into some detail over the robbery incident, which involved the purported theft of a watch owned by Benjamin, stated to be “an intelligent, well educated negro, sharp and witty.” He told the police that the timepiece was given to him when he lived for many years in Brinkley, Arkansas, not quite halfway between Little Rock and Memphis and added that it was a gift of a Masonic lodge.
Of the two men arrested, one was convicted, solely on Benjamin’s testimony, and sentenced to a three-year prison term, while the other, as noted above, was on trial when the alleged victim vanished, but that case was dismissed. The defense attorney in this latter matter sent a letter to the master of the lodge Benjamin claimed presented him the watch, with the missive stating,
A young colored man giving his name as Robert O. Benjamin, saying he is a lawyer, editor and minister is here. He claims to be a member of your lodge, and says that about 20 months ago [about October 1883] the lodge presented him with a gold watch and chain, bought at Tiffany’s New York . . . as we have a strong suspicion that Benjamin is not what he pretends to be, and is trading on the good name of your lodge, we write to find whether you know any such man.
We know, as observed in part two of this post, that, in October 1883, the time when Benjamin claimed he was given the watch in Arkansas, he was actually residing in Virginia. A reply from Brinkley was received confirming that there was no King Cyrus Lodge #1062 in that town and that no one by the name of Benjamin was found in the records of either the Black or white masonic lodges there. Moreover, the unnamed respondent stated that he was a 12-year resident and “can find no one who ever knew a man by this name . . . and can safely assure you that his statements are false.”
The Hamilton lawyer, whose surname happened to be Staunton, told the Spectator that “I think Benjamin lived by his wits and told the story simply to get himself advertised and gain the sympathy of his fellows.” When he told the police he was robbed, but “could not go back on it,” Benjamin “went away” and then “came back for his clothes thinking the matter would be dropped, but the police got onto him, and he was forced to testify. Then he hurried off again as fast as he could. If everything was square, why should he do this?”
Benjamin returned to the United States and resurfaced, at the end of 1885, in Louisville, where that city’s Courier-Journal of 17 December briefly told its readers that,
Mr. R.C.O. Benjamin, a colored lawyer, who has made some little reputation as an advocate [politically?] in Richmond, Va., has located in this city for the purpose of practicing his chosen profession. He will be the first representative of the negro race that has yet appeared in the capacity of a lawyer in the Central Kentucky courts.
Two days later, the Roundabout, a paper in the Kentucky capital city of Frankfort, reported that “R.C.O. Benjamin, Esq., a colored lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, has located in Lexington,” just to the east, “for the practice of his profession and we understand that he will open a branch office in this city.”
When 1886 dawned, however, Benjamin returned to Memphis, where his public career began a half-dozen years earlier, and became the pastor at the Christian Church on Vance Street. Back in Richmond, however, that city’s Dispatch of 18 March reported that Benjamin, sentenced to three months on chain-gang labor for the fraud conviction of nearly a year before was retried and convicted in absentia and handed a sentence double that length in jail.
Two days prior, the Hamilton Spectator revealed that its aforementioned story from a month before was learned about in Richmond, where that city’s police judge and communicated to Staunton, the lawyer in the Hamilton case, informing him of the conviction in the Virginia capital and added,
It has been said that he went to Canada. Benjamin practiced law while here and is a shrewd rascal. He is about 28 years old [31, actually], small, clean face, small features, brown color, and claims to have been born in the West Indies. We do not want him here, but I write this to let you know something about the man. He is utterly unprincipled and I would not believe him on oath.
It does not appear, however, that any of this was known in Kentucky or Tennessee and less than week after the Canada article came out, the 26 March issue of the Nashville Banner reported on a mass meeting at the St. John’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, with it “filled last night by a vast concourse of people, who met to express their condemnation of the outrageous massacre of colored citizens at Carrollton, Miss.”
On the evening of the 17th, at least 50 white men, and perhaps up to double that number, burst into the Carroll County Courthouse and shot at the two Brown brothers, who were involved in an incident with a white man in January that led to near violence the following month with an attorney and newspaper editor who was then arrested and faced trial when the attack took place. The siblings and 21 other African-Americans were slaughtered by the mob, while no white person in the courtroom was injured.
The Banner continued that “the colored people of Nashville, and indeed all over the country, are indignant . . . and the meeting was to condemn the Mississippi murders and enter a public protest against the indifference and tardiness displayed by the authorities of that state in taking measures to bring the perpetrators to justice.”
Benjamin was one of the seven men on the resolutions committee who proclaimed that if “such acts of butchery were allowed with impunity” then “it is subversive of the first principles of government” as well as “ruinous and destructive to the best interests of our section.” While noting that protection of Black people was dependent on the citizens of the state, the committee accused Mississippi officials of being accomplices “in the greatest crime against the laws of God and man” for its inaction against “the perpetrators of so foul and shocking a deed and sin.”
The attorney was one of four speakers and the paper remarked that
He was also vigorous in his denunciation of the wrongs perpetrated upon his race, and said that if protection could not be secured the colored people must protect themselves.
Benjamin also gave addresses during this period, including at Maysville, Kentucky, located on the Ohio River southeast of Cincinnati, with the city’s Bulletin of 27 May remarking that his talk, “The Negro Problem Solved,” was well-received and that “Mr. Benjamin is a fluent speaker and his lecture was full of wit and good humor.”
One talk, though, in Murfreesboro, southeast of Nashville, led the American of the latter city to comment that Benjamin’s speech there did not go well, leading the lecturer to write to the Banner, which on 12 July published his rejoinder that “I was not laughed down, but on the contrary was attentively listened to by the several hundred citizens present,” while he offered several names of those who could attest to the statement.
The Black-owned Alabama newspaper, the Huntsville Gazette, of 28 August reported that “the distinguished lecturer who is visiting in the city city” from Nashville was to give a talk in three days to the Ladies Educational Aid Society on “Stumbling Blocks to the Race.” The paper added that “Mr. Benjamin is a fine, fluent orator and a deep thinker” and advised its readers “don’t fail to come out Tuesday night and hear him.”
Not quite a month later, the Gazette noted that Benjamin relocated to Birmingham and was to launch his own paper called the Negro American. The 9 October edition of Huntsville sheet welcomed the new paper to its exchange and observed that it was “handsome in make up and interesting and able in matter” as it concluded “success to it.”
A little over a month later, on 15 November, a strange situation took place in Montgomery, the capital city of Alabama. Benjamin was walking down a street when, in a crowd, he stepped on the foot a white man named Thomas Clanton. As reported in the next day’s Montgomery Advertiser, Clanton “pushed him off,” though one obviously wonders if something was said, as well, because “the negro struck him and knocked him down.” Jumping to his feet, Clanton pulled out a gun and fired at Benjamin, though missed hitting him as “police officers appeared on the scene and put a stop to the difficulty.”
Notably, while both men were arrested, Clanton was able to post bail, while Benjamin “was lodged in the city prison in default of bond.” The Advertiser of the 19th noted that, at the Mayor’s Court, Clanton pled guilty to firing a gun within city limits (as opposed to something like an attempt to murder) and was sentenced to a fine of $50 and court costs. As to Benjamin, his case was dismissed “the evidence showing that [he] acted in self defense.” Obviously, it seems clear that Clanton received special treatment because of his adversary’s race.
As 1886 edged toward a close, the Birmingham Post-Herald remarked, in its 14 December edition, on “A Great Enterprise,” this described as “one of the important events promised for the future” of the city, in the form of “the world’s fair to the colored people of the United States.” It was asserted that “the colored people of the population of the south can make the best show for the section in their own industrial ability” as well as an effort to demonstrate “what the colored industrial inhabitants could do for themselves in bearing their part of civilization.”
Benjamin was among a quartet of African-American men, the others being ministers, in the capital who were said to be “among the prominent colored people interested in the movement.” Phillip Joseph, also of Montgomery, was identified as the general director and told the paper that “Birmingham is so well known and advertised throughout the world that it is conceded to be the best possible place of all countries, where are to be found descendants of the African race educated to the highest state of civilization.”
The Gazette’s edition of the 18th briefly noted that Benjamin was “compelled to retire from journalism, owing to a failure of his eyesight.” That same day, though, the editor drew the ire of his former supporter and employer, William C. Chase of the African-American-owned Washington Bee, because of a comment in the Negro American regarding the tenure of James C Matthews, the first Black law school graduate in New York state, who was a recess appointment by President Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat in the White House since 1860, as Recorded of Deeds because the Republican-controlled Senate was unlike to approve a nomination of Matthews, who was a rare African-American Democrat.
Matthews, who succeeded Frederick Douglass in the position, was, Benjamin claimed in an editorial, “turning off [firing] the colored clerks in his department and substituting white ones” which was ample demonstration that “no faith is to be put in a Democrat even if he is black.” Chase, however, fired back, “this is a lie and Mr. R.C.O. Benjamin knows it” while bitterly adding, “we desire to say further that a more unscrupulous Negro democrat never existed than Mr. Benjamin” as it told readers “this gentleman and a few other Negro renegades split the republican colored vote in Pennsylvania” during a period mentioned earlier in this post. The Bee publisher concluded, “does the gentleman deny it? Give us a rest Benjamin.”
With the year 1886 coming to a close, we’ll do the same with this part of the post, the featured image of which was uploaded to Benjamin’s Find-a-Grave page by F. Greenbaum, but return with a fourth one that takes us to 1887 and more controversy involving our subject as we finally get to the Los Angeles part of the story. Check back for that!
The general first impression of R.C.O. Benjamin was of a clean appearance, good education, eloquent speech, and affluence. However, further observations, which were often made shortly afterward, described him as fraudulent, deceptive, and transient.
I wonder if this peripatetic law practitioner’s frequent moves from one place to another were not driven by wanderlust, but rather by a need to escape.