Mar 24, 2022 - Sale 2598

Sale 2598 - Lot 347

Price Realized: $ 1,125
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
(POLITICS.) Standard Bearer of National Liberty Party for President, U.S.A., 1904: Very Truly, Geo. E. Taylor. Illustrated placard, 11 x 8 1/4 inches, on card stock, with printed signature; small abrasions in image, surface adhesion loss in margins, minor dampstaining. No place, 1904
Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

George Edwin Taylor (1857-1925) was the son of an enslaved man and a free Black woman in Arkansas. He made his way to Wisconsin as an orphan in 1865, where he became a labor activist and newspaper publisher. He moved to Iowa in 1891. In 1904 he was chosen to head the presidential ticket of the newly formed National Liberty Party, against incumbent Republican Theodore Roosevelt. As described on this card: "Notice: The only Negro who ever made the race for President." His write-in campaign gathered a few thousand votes. He spent the last years of his life in Florida.

Taylor was the subject of a 2011 book by Bruce Mouser, "For Labor, Race, and Liberty: George Edwin Taylor, his Historic Run for the White House, and the Making of Independent Black Politics." We trace only one other example of this placard, at the University of North Florida.