Boston State Senator William Owens, with Donald Brown on The Gist of Freedom and TANDLRADIO.COM! This show is in honor of George Edwin Taylor!

More than one hundred years before Barack Obama, George Edwin Taylor made presidential history. Born in the antebellum South to an enslaved black man  and a freed woman, Taylor became one of the first African American ticketed as a political party’s nominee for president of the United States, running against Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.

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Read it here http://bit.ly/BlackPresCandidate

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Orphaned as a child at the peak of the Civil War, Taylor spent several years homeless before boarding a Mississippi riverboat that dropped him in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Taken in by an African American farm family, Taylor attended a private school and eventually rose to prominence as the owner and editor of a labor newspaper and as a vocal leader in Wisconsin’s People’s Party. At a time when many African Americans felt allegiance to the Republican Party for its support of abolition, Taylor’s sympathy with the labor cause drew him first to the national Democratic Party and then to an African American party, the newly formed National Liberty Party, which in 1904 named him its presidential candidate.