Richard Harvey Cain

Born: April 12, 1825 in Virginia

Died: January 18, 1887 in Washington, District of Columbia

United States Representative, 1873–1875; 1877–1879

Republican from South Carolina

• Richard Harvey Cain was one of six African Americans to represent South Carolina in Congress during Reconstruction. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for two non-consecutive terms.
• Cain, a clergyman and politician, was born free in Greenbriar County, Virginia (now West Virginia), and moved with his Black father (possibly African-born) and Cherokee mother to Gallipolis, Ohio, in 1831. Living in a “free state” afforded Cain an education. He attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, America's 1st Private HBCU.
• In 1861, Cain was assigned to serve as pastor at the Bridge Street Church in Brooklyn, New York.
• In 1865, at the end of the Civil War, the AME Church assigned Cain to Charleston, S.C., to minister to recently freed slaves. In 1866 he became editor of the Missionary Record, a Black newspaper and became politically active. 
• Cain helped found Paul Quinn College in Waco, Texas, and served as the college's second president.
• Cain moved to Washington, D.C. to serve as bishop of the AME Conference with jurisdiction in the mid–Atlantic and New England states and died there in 1887 at the age of 61.
• In 2021, the Schomburg Center, in partnership with Penguin Classics, published Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition, edited by Schomburg's Michelle D. Commander, which includes Cain's essay "All We Ask Is Equal Laws, Equal Legislation, and Equal Rights" (1874).

Richard Harvey Cain

1921

The History of the Negro Church Collection

Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division

NYPL Digital Collections: R. H. (Richard Harvey) Cain.