500
Who was the first African American governor of a U.S. State?
A. Henry Warmoth
B. Pinckney Pinchback
C. Booker T. Washington
D. Douglas Wilder
[B] False
Pinckney Pinchback (1837 – 1921) was appointed governor of the State of Louisiana serving a short term from 1872 to 1873, the first person of African American descent to serve in a U.S. state’s highest elected office. He fought in the Civil War on the Union side, and became a captain in the army. After the war, he returned to New Orleans and entered politics as a Republican. In 1968, he became a delegate to Louisiana’s state constitutional convention and helped draft its new constitution. Later that year, he won his election to become a state senator. In 1871, the lieutenant governor died and Pinchback, as president of the senate, assumed his role because the elected governor, Henry Warmoth, was under impeachment proceedings. Pinchback served officially for 36 days, December 1872 to January of 1873, and approved ten legislative bills. He continued to rise in Louisiana politics and was elected to the United States Senate, but was denied his seat due to an election embroiled by racial tensions. He died at the age of 84 in Washington, DC in 1921. Pinchback’s father was a white Mississippi planter and his mother a freed black slave. When his father died in 1848, his mother moved her family of nine children to Ohio to avoid any future effort to return them to slavery. Pinchback began working as a cabin boy on Mississippi River steamboats at the age of 12 to support his family, and rose to become a ship steward. He married Nina Hawthorne at the age of 21 and the couple became parents of four children.