C.H.J. Taylor

Charles Henry James Taylor, usually styled C.H.J. Taylor (1857–1899), was an African American journalist, editor, lawyer, orator, and political organizer. An early supporter of Democratic Grover Cleveland, he was appointed Minister to Liberia in Cleveland's first presidential term.

During Cleveland's second term, Taylor was the first African American ever nominated for a diplomatic appointment to a "white" country (Bolivia), although he was not confirmed by the Senate. He was subsequently made Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, a position he held until early in the McKinley administration. After leaving Washington, Taylor edited an Atlanta newspaper, The Appeal, as well as being dean of the Law Department at Morris Brown College.

Taylor was born in slavery on a plantation near Marion, Alabama, possibly in 1856, although sources differ on the year of his birth, as about many details of his life. After the Civil War he went with his family to Savannah, where he was educated at Beach Institute, a school of the American Missionary Association. He may have attended Oberlin College, in Ohio, and have studied law at the University of Michigan. He claimed to have graduated from the latter institution, although there is no record of his having done so. He was admitted to the bar in Marion County, Indiana, in 1882, and served as a deputy district attorney in Indiana’s Nineteenth Judicial District. In 1883, while teaching school in Palmyra, Missouri, Taylor met and married Julia Shropshire, and in the following year moved to Kansas, where he began his career as an orator and political organizer.

Although Taylor, like most African Americans at the time, initially supported Republican candidates and campaigned for Kansas Republican gubernatorial candidate John Martin in 1884, he was disappointed at the lack of patronage positions Republicans offered blacks. In 1884 he began publishing a newspaper, “in the interests of democracy,” and in 1886 ran for local office in Wyandotte County as an independent. In 1887, Cleveland appointed Taylor U.S. Minister to Liberia. He stayed in Liberia only five months, claiming he had returned to campaign for Cleveland’s re-election, although he later made statements strongly critical of Liberian politics, and of the emigration schemes of the American Colonization Society.

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