R. C. O. Benjamin

Robert Charles O'Hara Benjamin (born March 31, 1855 on Saint Kitts, West Indies; died October 2, 1900 in Lexington, Kentucky) was a novelist, attorney, orator and newspaper publisher who founded the Negro American in Birmingham in the 1880s.

Benjamin studied at Oxford University in England and traveled extensively after graduating, voyaging to the East and West Indies and Central and South America before settling in New York in the Fall of 1869. He was immediately active in public affairs and was employed by Joe Howard, Jr of the New York Star as a solicitor. There he became acquainted with Progressive American editor John J. Freeman and joined that publication as city editor. After leaving that paper, Benjamin worked as corresponding editor for the Nashville, Tennessee Free Lance. Beginning then he adopted the pen name "Cicero" for some of his editorial contributions.

Benjamin was well-known as a public speaker and campaigned for Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. He accepted a position with the post office in New York, but left not long after to become a schoolteacher in Kentucky where he also began to read law. He completed his studies in Memphis and was admitted to the Tennessee State Bar in January 1880. While in that city, he was described by local schoolteacher Ida B. Wells as, "a very slender, puerile-looking, small specimen of humanity." He practiced as an attorney intermittently at different stops in his career, and famously won acquittal for a black woman accused of murder in Richmond, Virginia in 1884.

Benjamin's primary activity was the establishment of a series of newspapers across the country, including The Colored Citizen in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and The Chronicle in Evansville, Indiana before he arrived in Birmingham. Benjamin's editorial voice was focused on promoting equal rights for African Americans, following his motto: "My race first and my best friends next." He was known as a courageous editor, unafraid of commenting on touchy issues, which included lynchings and other campaigns of racial violence in the South. He exceeded many African American social activists in calling upon blacks to arm and defend themselves against violence and described himslef as a "chronic disturber of the peace".

Benjamin launched the Negro American some time before 1887, but his outspokenness was unwelcome and he was forced to leave the city before the end of that year. His "last straw" appeared to be an editorial defending Montgomery Baptist Leader publisher Jesse C. Duke. Duke had mused about, "the growing appreciation of the white Juliet for the colored Romeo," following the lynching of an African American man accused of rape and was forced to flee the state, chased by a mob.

Benjamin moved to the west coast and was hired as local editor for the white-owned Los Angeles, California Daily Sun in 1888. After two years he moved North to San Francisco and founded the California Sentinel there. In California he was elected presiding elder of the state's conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. President Benjamin Harrison offered Benjamin a consulate post in Haiti, but he declined in order to continue publishing the Sentinel.

In 1892 he married the former Lula M. Robinson and had two children, a son and daughter. He brought his family to Lexington, Kentucky in 1897 and quickly involved himself in political issues there. In October 1900 he got into an argument Michael Moynahan, a Democratic precinct worker whom Benjamin accused of harassing African American registrants. Afterward Moynahan shot Benjamin in the back, killing him. The presiding judge at the examination accepted Moynahan's claim of self-defense and declined to pursue criminal charges.

Publications

• Benjamin, R. C. O. (1883) Poetic Gems
• Benjamin, R. C. O. ( ) The Boy Doctor
• Benjamin, R. C. O. ( ) History of British West Indies
• Benjamin, R. C. O. ( ) Future of the American Negro
• Benjamin, R. C. O. ( ) The Southland
• Benjamin, R. C. O. ( ) Africa
• Benjamin, R. C. O. ( ) Hope of the Negro Life
• Benjamin, R. C. O. (1891) Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture
• Benjamin, R. C. O. (1894) Southern Outrages: A Statistical Record of Lawless Doings

References

• Penn, Irvine Garland (1891) The Afro-American Press and Its Editors Springfield, Massachusetts: Willey & Company
• Garraty, John A. & Mark C. Carnes, eds. (1999) American National Biography. Oxford University Press ISBN 0195127994
• Jordan, William G. (2001) Black Newspapers and America's War for Democracy, 1914-1920. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press ISBN 0807849367
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B. (1995) The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. Miriam DeCosta-Willis, ed. Beacon Press. ISBN 0807070653