TAYLOR, GEORGE EDWIN (4 August 1857–23 December 1925), American journalist, editor, and political activist. Taylor was the first African American to run for president, in 1904.
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Taylor was the son of a free mother and an enslaved father. After Arkansas enacted the 1859 Free Negro Expulsion Bill, compelling free Blacks to leave the state, Taylor’s mother took her infant son to Alton, Illinois, a major center of Underground Railroad activity, only to die a few years later. The orphaned Taylor, still just a toddler, was forced to live in “dry-goods boxes” before boarding a riverboat at age seven that brought him to Wisconsin, where he lived with various foster-care families until he was twenty.
In 1877 Taylor enrolled in a Baptist preparatory school in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, though poor health and lack of funds would force him to leave without graduating. Upon returning to La Crosse Taylor began working as a reporter to support himself, and before long he was writing both for local papers as well as the Chicago-based Inter Ocean, and in 1885 he became editor of the La Crosse Evening Star and owner/editor of the Wisconsin Labor Advocate from 1886 to 1887.
As Taylor’s reputation grew so did his involvement in politics. He became active in the Wisconsin labor movement, serving as secretary of the La Crosse Workingmen’s Party and cofounding the Wisconsin People’s Party.
Taylor moved to Oskaloosa, Iowa, in 1891, where he published the Negro Solicitor and deepened his political involvement, switching his emphasis from labor to racial issues and becoming president of the National Negro Democratic League and the National Colored Men’s Protective Association and serving in numerous other Black organizations.
In 1904 Taylor made history by becoming the first African American to receive a nomination for president of the United States from a national political party, representing the National Negro Liberty Party. He ran against incumbent Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Alton B. Parker on a platform that included support for pensions for former slaves and independence for Puerto Rico and the Phillippines. He also strongly condemned the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans then taking place in the South and hoped to address Jim Crow laws, segregation, and other forms of systemic racism. Despite the long odds Taylor campaigned tirelessly, crisscrossing the nation and delivering impassioned speeches. His candidacy was widely ignored, not only by White voters but by the majority of Black voters as well. According to journalist Matt Soergel, “Most thought it best to stick with the major parties, rather than an upstart one that espoused then-radical ideas.”
Though Taylor’s bid for the presidency ended in defeat, his third-party candidacy reflected both the Republican and Democratic parties’ failure to protect the hard-won civil rights of African Americans following the Civil War. A few days before the election Taylor spoke to a newspaper about his candidacy: “Yes, I know most White folks take me as a joke ... but I want to tell you the colored man is beginning to see a lot of things that the White folks do not give him credit for seeing. He’s beginning to see that he has got to take care of his own interests, and what’s more, that he has the power to do it.” In the years following the election Taylor lived an active yet quiet life in Jacksonville, Florida. He continued his journalistic career, working for a time as editor of the Florida Times-Union’s “colored” section and later as editor of the weekly Florida Sentinel. He died in 1925.