Жосиа Томас Уоллс: АҚШ Конгресінің алғашқы афроамерикалық өкілі

American politician

Josiah Thomas Walls (December 30, 1842 – May 15, 1905) was a United States congressman who served three terms in the U. S. Congress between 1871 and 1876. He was one of the first African Americans in the United States Congress elected during the Reconstruction Era, and the first black person to be elected to Congress from Florida. He also served four terms in the Florida Senate.

Josiah Walls was born into slavery in 1842 near Winchester, Virginia to unknown parents. During the American Civil War, he was forced to work without pay as a slave for the Confederate army. He was captured by the Union Army in 1862 at Yorktown. He voluntarily joined the United States Colored Troops in 1863 and rose to the rank of sergeant major. He was discharged in Florida and settled in Alachua County, Florida. Thanks to some early education and self tutoring during the war, Walls was able to work as a teacher in nearby Archer. Not much more is known about his younger life is known as of now.

Walls served as a delegate to the state constitutional convention of 1868, representing Alachua County. Later that year, he was elected to the Florida House of Representatives from Alachua, along with his friend, Henry Harmon, serving in Florida's first Reconstruction Legislature. When State Senator Horatio Jenkins was appointed to a county judgeship, Walls decided to run in the special election to succeed him. He was elected to the Alachua and Levy County district on December 29, 1868, and took office in January. Walls served as state senator for the 1869 and 1870 legislative session.

In 1870, Walls was nominated as the Republican candidate for Florida's sole at large congressional seat after a contentious party convention. A moderate faction of mostly white carpetbaggers, led by U. S. Senator Thomas W. Osborn, supported the freedman Robert Meacham, while the majority of black delegates were split between several more radical black candidates, including Walls. Walls won the nomination on the 11th ballot, after the other black candidates withdrew to prevent Meacham from winning. In June 1874, Walls formed a law partnership in Gainesville with Henry S. Harmon, who had been the first African American admitted to the bar in Florida, and William U. Saunders. The next year Harmon and Saunders moved their legal practice to Tallahassee.

Leaving politics, Walls operated a successful farm in Alachua County until the disastrous freeze of 1894–1895, which destroyed his crops. He took a teaching position as Farm Director of the State Normal and Industrial College for Colored Students, which much later would become Florida A&M University, in Tallahassee. After nearly a decade there, he died on May 5, 1905.