African Americans registered to vote in droves. South Carolina’s Black voters quickly outnumbered whites. In 1868, the Black majority elected Francis Lewis Cardozo as the South Carolina secretary of state. Howard and the American Missionary Association had sent Cardozo to the state to establish freedmen’s schools in South Carolina before he became the first African American to hold a statewide office in the United States. Black voters also sent Richard Cain, superintendent of AME missions and pastor of the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, to the South Carolina state senate. In the
...more
