James Thomas Rapier

Born: November 13, 1837 in Florence, Alabama

Died: May 31, 1883 in Montgomery, Alabama

United States Representative, 1873–1875

Republican from Alabama

• James Thomas Rapier was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a congressman from a district in Alabama with a population consisting of less than 50 percent African American.
• A freeborn Alabamian educated in Nashville and Ontario, Canada, Rapier returned to Tennessee during the Civil War when Tennessee returned to the Union in 1863. 
• In 1866 he returned to Alabama and became a successful farmer. He founded the first Black-owned and Black-operated newspaper in the state, the Republican Sentinel, on April 1, 1872, which he used to promote Republican politics and Black civil rights. 
• Rapier was one of seven Black Representatives who fought for the passage of the major Civil Rights Bill of 1875.
• Due to threats of violence from the Ku Klux Klan, Rapier was unable get reelected and became increasingly disillusioned with the prospects for African Americans in the South. He began to call for Black emigration to the West (Midwest) and even purchased land in Kansas to establish a Black community.
• Before he could establish his model community, Rapier, a lifelong bachelor, died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 45, on May 31, 1883.

James Thomas Rapier

1875

Print Collection

Photographs and Prints Division

NYPL Digital Collection: H.R. Revels; James T. Rapier; B. K. Bruce; J. H. Rainey; John R. Lynch.