New book uncovers history of Louisiana’s first Black governor

17th May 2021   ·   0 Comments

By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer

In 1873, way back before any of the historically controversial Confederate monuments were erected in New Orleans, before insidious white supremacy was re-established in Louisiana, before the ultimate collapse of the post-Civil War Reconstruction attempts at equality, freedom and integration, a multiracial group of New Orleanians established plans to erect another monument, one that mysteriously was never installed.

But not only did the failure to erect a statue honoring Oscar Dunn – a former slave who in the late 1860s and early 1870s became the state’s and the nation’s first elected Black lieutenant governor and first Black acting governor – prevent later generations from honoring his enormous accomplishments, that failure also symbolized how the very idea of Dunn and his incredible life were eventually, for all intents and purposes, erased from Louisiana and American history altogether.

But now, after extensive research and collaborative creativity in recent years, Dunn’s story is finally being told. Earlier this year, The Historic New Orleans Collection published, “Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana,” a 251-page graphic biography aimed not just at enlightening the public, but also educating and inspiring newer generations to learn about their community’s past to aspire to great heights themselves.

The underlying message of the new graphic book – an art form that brings the illustrated comics medium into book-length, detailed narratives – helps to draw parallels to modern American society, which, like the turbulent years of Reconstruction, remains sharply divided along racial lines. Today, as in Dunn’s day, white supremacist actions and beliefs have become more vocal and popular, while progressives who push back against such rancid racism press for economic, legal and political equality, fairness and justice.

Those involved in the creation of “Monumental” – authors Brian K. Mitchell, Barrington S. Edwards and Nick Weldon – hope modern readers and learners will be able to draw and examine parallels between what Dunn battled in his day and what modern social justice advocates are combating today.

“We know that hate can be taught,” Mitchell said. “We know that prejudice and racism, in order to survive, must be taught. We know that segregation and separation feed our fears and xenophobia. Dunn believed more than anything that our children were our best chance to improve the world.

“His life story is a reminder that greatness and genius can be found even in the poorest and the most unlikely of places – remember he was born a slave,” Mitchell added. “Dunn’s narrative offers a message of hope – a new tomorrow – and gives our children something to aspire to.”

Weldon said the reverberations of the political and societal machinations that Dunn fought to rise above and dismantle are evident today in the systemic killings of Black Americans by law enforcement and the increasingly bold and bald-faced maneuvers to restrict voting and disenfranchise people of color. When biased, white-dominated, mainstream society pushes back against social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, Weldon said, echoes of Oscar Dunn’s life and aspirations are heard.

“Oscar Dunn’s life mattered – it mattered so much that 20,000 mourners attended his funeral, the largest in the history of New Orleans at the time,” Weldon said. “It mattered so much that even in 1873 there were white and Black people trying to make a monument in his memory. But his life undermined white supremacy, so it was buried.

“I see similar themes in the backlash to Black Lives Matter,” he added. “Who could disagree with such a phrase and movement? With the notion of supporting and affirming the lives of fellow humans? But the fact that so many see it as a threat underscores why it must be said, and underscores the work that still has to be done to disentangle white supremacy from our society.”

The details of Dunn’s life and rise contain the reasons why, until now, he’s been completely absent from historical texts and classroom materials. Born a slave in New Orleans in 1826, he was emancipated a decade later; both of his parents were also former slaves who had earned emancipation. Dunn’s father worked as a carpenter and, as a youth, Oscar himself apprenticed under a plasterer and painter.

However, while now free people of color, the Dunns, including Oscar, were set apart from Black Creole society, which was dominated by French-speaking, Black Catholics who were often well connected, middle-class and entrenched in the color-based racial caste system that existed somewhat symbiotically with the white power structure of New Orleans.

The Dunns, meanwhile, were Protestant, English-speaking laborers and tradesmen who personally understood the horrors of slavery and experienced the challenges facing Black Americans who had to build lives out of hardscrabble, humble beginnings.

It’s that duality, that first-hand experience and ability to work with many different cultures in Louisiana, that made Oscar Dunn such an ideal figure through which people of color could frame their fight for justice and equality.

“These characteristics placed him in a unique space following emancipation and as the movement for suffrage got underway in New Orleans,” Weldon said. “He had a lot more in common with the freedmen than many of the Afro-Creole elites who were in the vanguard of the suffrage movement.”

Weldon said Dunn’s efforts in the community – especially as the operator of a post-war intelligence agency that helped freedmen find fair work and above-minimum wage pay on plantations that now needed to hire employees to function – made him a popular figure among people of color, especially former slaves. Dunn’s involvement in organizations like the Masons and his efforts on behalf of the welfare of Black children also positioned him for greatness.

“Dunn was in many ways a bridge between the activists of the day and the masses of freedmen seeking a better life,” Weldon said. “He was somebody who could bring disparate parties to the table and find solutions that worked for everybody. He was a leader in numerous benevolent organizations, with a particular interest in protecting Black children and orphans from predatory planters.”

Mitchell said Dunn used his own experiences as preparation for his political life and efforts.

“Everything about Dunn prepared him for the role that he would later play in history,” Mitchell said. “He had been born a slave, grew up as a free person of color and spoke English and French fluently. He loved education and reading, and he became a leader in two important institutions before being elevated to public office, the [African Methodist Episcopal] Church (St. James) and the Prince Hall Masons. He proved himself an exceptional leader,” Mitchell added, “a guardian for not only the freedmen but for all people in the state.”

From those beginnings, Dunn rose swiftly through the political ranks following the Civil War and during Reconstruction. Advocating goals of universal suffrage, publicly funded education for all children and equality of all men under the law, Dunn became a popular member of the state Republican Party. He was elected to the New Orleans City Council in 1867; as a council member he drafted a bill that would have integrated local public schools, an idea that failed at that time at the city level but was enshrined in the new state constitution in 1868.

However, he was rising through a Louisiana Republican Party that was split into factions, a division that would ultimately cause Dunn’s erasure from the history books. Dunn and many of his colleagues were aligned as Radical Republicans who took a more hard-lined, militant approach to integration and civil rights than the centrists of the party, who frequently sought partnerships and compromises with conservative white Democrats.

Significantly, joining Warmoth in the centrist faction was P.B.S. Pinchback, a mixed-race political figure who served as president of the state Senate.

But it wasn’t only political platforms that divided Republicans. Dunn and many of his Radical colleagues, including many Black members, were straight arrows who shunned temptations toward vice and corruption, as opposed the moderate Republicans – represented at the time by white gubernatorial candidate Henry Warmoth – many of whom were eventually susceptible to the types of bribery and cronyism that fueled reactionary white discontent aimed at limiting and then crushing integration and equality.

Dunn reluctantly joined the Warmoth ticket in the 1868 election as the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor. Because the newly-established Recon-struction state constitution brought enfranchisement to thousands of freedmen who exercised their newfound right to vote to sweep Republicans into office across the state, the Warmoth-Dunn ticket emerged victorious.

But the seeds of division within the GOP quickly sprouted into contentiousness and racial retrenchment. While Warmoth and his allies slid into corruption and rejected an ambitious, progressive civil rights bill, Dunn remained firm in his commitment to both his integrity and his political goals.

Then, in 1871, Dunn was elevated to acting governor for two stints when Warmoth’s health prevented the latter from actively serving as governor and living in the state. Thus Dunn became the first Black American to occupy the office of governor in the United States.

However, Dunn died suddenly and mysteriously on Nov. 22, 1871; the exact cause of his death remains unknown, and some historians and activists have voiced the possibility that he was poisoned or assassinated through similar subterfuge. As a result, Warmoth’s ally Pinchback – who was much more adept at playing the sometimes-slippery political game than Dunn – was elevated to lieutenant governor. Pinchback would eventually become acting governor himself in December 1872 when Warmoth was suspended from office during impeachment proceedings.

Pinchback would only remain governor for just over a month before he left office after the end of Warmoth’s elected term in January 1873.

The year 1872 – especially the hotly contested, bitter and controversial gubernatorial election that fall – marked a crucial turning point in Louisiana history and politics as the state GOP continued to fracture and split with dissension, allowing resurgent white Democrats to reassert the influence of racial repression and white supremacy.

As Reconstruction collapsed and Jim Crowism was steadily instituted in Louisiana by the so-called “Redeemers” – white reactionaries who pressed, sometimes violently, for the end of Reconstruction and the re-establishment of the antebellum social and racial order – over the last quarter of the 19th century, history was being written by those who had the power to influence and define it. Mitchell and Weldon said that immediately after Dunn’s death, his uncompromising ethics, virtue and dogged determination would garner plaudits and respect from both the Black populace as well as white citizens, who, while staunchly opposed to Dunn’s political platform, still held him in relatively high regard for his refusal to be corrupted, his commitment to honesty and the sheer, uncompromising passion he brought to his work and life. That bi-partisan, multiracial respect led to the effort to erect a monument in his name.

“Even conservative rivals begrudged that he was a fair dealer and that his reputation was beyond repute,” Weldon said.

“These are the things Dunn should be remembered for being: a trailblazer on the issues of suffrage, workers’ rights, civil rights, and school integration, and a model public official lauded by allies and rivals alike,” Weldon added.

However, as time wore on, it was Pinchback who was elevated to near-icomic status and who became popularly known as the first Black American governor. Despite Pinchback’s embroilment in the ethically compromised, politically doubtful turmoil in the Warmoth GOP, Pinchback, not Dunn, went down in history.

“First, Dunn’s story was not overlooked or forgotten,” Mitchell said. “It was erased. In order to repress Black people during Jim Crow, narratives of men like Dunn could not survive. What Dunn was was counter to everything that the [white supremacist] Redeemers believed and the world that they hoped to create. Dunn was a symbol of hope for Blacks across the nation. A symbol of what we were capable of at our best. His ability to unite both Black and white men behind a common cause scared the hell of his rivals.”

Fortunately, Mitchell blazed trails himself by digging into the real history and beginning the resurrection of Dunn’s life and legacy. At age 8, Mitchell first learned of Dunn during an informal family history lesson from Mitchell’s great-grandmother, and Mitchell’s curiosity and desire to learn more about Dunn gradually and eventually grew into his doctoral dissertation.

The exhaustive research and subsequent writing done by Mitchell led to the collaboration between him and Weldon, an associate editor at The Historic New Orleans Collection, and Edwards, a Massachusetts-based artist and community activist. The result was “Monumental.”

Because of the groundbreaking nature of the graphic book’s insight and research, as well as the inspiration it can provide to younger (and older) generations, the HNOC is engaging in an ambitious community-outreach effort to publicize and disseminate the volume throughout the state, said Jessica Dorman, the director of publications for the HNOC.

She said the HNOC is actively soliciting donations of copies of the book to classrooms and public libraries across the state, including an “adopt a classroom” option of the Collection’s Web site.

“We want to have them in readers’ hands, not just sitting in bookstores,” she said.

In addition, she said, the Collection is working with teachers to develop curricula and “virtual field trips” that the educators can use to teach Dunn’s life and impact to students at the start of the new school year this fall.

“We need to be good stewards of these gifts,” she said. “We’re working hard to build relationships with educators so we’re not just throwing the book at teachers, but to give it to teachers who want it and want to train with us.”

On top of the efforts to circulate the book and its lessons in schools and libraries, “Monumental” has played a key role in the HNOC’s 2021 programming, including the symposium in March titled, “Recovered Voices Black Activism in New Orleans from Reconstruction to the Present Day,” at the Williams Research Center. Another book, about the Economy Hall community organization by author Fatima Shaik, was also discussed and presented at the symposium.

Dorman said that “there are so many ways to tell a story,” and Mitchell’s research and leadership in illuminating Dunn’s life fits perfectly with that philosophy of bringing those stories to the widest possible audience.

“It goes back to the vision Brian Mitchell had from the very beginning,” Dorman said. “He is a teacher at heart, and he felt this story needed to be told in a very accessible way to young readers, but also to all readers.”

She added that the dovetailing of Mitchell’s hard work with that of Weldon and Edwards’ lends itself for such creative, innovative educational opportunities.

“We’ve never been so lucky to have a trio of people bringing different strengths who shared a vision for telling a story, and that’s what [HNOC is] all about,” she said.

Dorman added that “Oscar Dunn’s story has lessons to teach, and it can inspire us for generations over time.”

Weldon summarized the tale of Oscar Dunn, his trailblazing accomplishments, and the original obfuscation and ensuing resuscitation of his legacy as no less than, well, monumental.

“Dunn’s life achievements were profound, and it’s important that we remember them, but I think it’s even more important that we reflect on why we aren’t familiar with his story,” Weldon said. “Because the answer to that question involves a larger conversation about white supremacy and the fight over the American narrative.

“It’s not by accident that Brian’s second-grade teacher told him Louisiana had never had a Black governor or lieutenant governor,” he added. “She didn’t know, because the first authors of that history were white men in a Jim Crow society with deep sympathies with Redemption narratives in the South – narratives that beatified Confederate leaders, made heroes of the Ku Klux Klan and denigrated or erased the stories of Black people of the era. Brian draws parallels in his historiographical essay between the white supremacist backlash to the Obama presidency and the violent white reaction to Reconstruction.”

Mitchell said the lessons of Dunn’s life, as well as his previously obscured but nevertheless massive place in history, will hopefully reverberate in today’s society and the struggle for knowledge, equality and fairness.

“He led by example and avoided the vices that so often ensnare politicians, even today,” he said. “In a time when many in our nation thought of Black men as nothing more than beasts of burden or at best children trapped in men’s bodies, Dunn proved that black men could be powerful, courageous, selfless and exceptional leaders.”

This article originally published in the May 17, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.