According to some reports, George Edwin Taylor was the first Black person selected by a political party to run for president.
Becoming a fixture of Wisconsin’s still-prominent labor movement, he relocated to Iowa and involved himself in politics while also running his weekly newspaper, The Negro Solicitor. Taylor’s prominence in political and civil rights circles became something of note when he became president of the National Colored Men’s Protective Association, and aligned with the National Negro Democratic League, an organization of Black Democratic Party members.
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In November 1904, Taylor was named the presidential nominee for the National Negro Liberty Party. Also known as the National Liberty Party, it was said to be the first political party created for and by Black people.
Shirley Chisholm is the first Black presidential candidate for a major political party. In 1848, Frederick Douglass received a single vote as a presidential candidate for the Liberty Party but most view the gesture as symbolic more than anything.
Source: Little Known Black History Fact: George Edwin Taylor
