George W. Murray
1853 — 1926 · Born enslaved; congressman and inventor; he read the roll of Black inventors into the Record and sold land so his people could keep the vote
George Washington Murray was born enslaved on the twenty-second of September 1853 near Rembert, in Sumter County, South Carolina, and stood orphaned at emancipation. He taught himself, taught school, and in 1874 entered the University of South Carolina in the brief season Reconstruction held its doors open — until 1877, when redemption came and every Black student was forced out. He finished at the State Normal Institution and gave fifteen years to Sumter County's classrooms and fields, rising as a lecturer of the Colored Farmers' Alliance.
Appointed a customs inspector at Charleston in 1890, he was elected to the Fifty-third Congress in 1892 — the only Black member of that Congress and the next. In August 1894 he rose in the House and read into the Congressional Record the patent examiner's roll of ninety-two patents held by Black inventors — and he spoke as one of them, for that same year he patented eight agricultural inventions of his own, a fertilizer distributor and planter and cotton chopper among them, with a ninth patent later; the National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted him in 2024. Cheated of the 1894 election, he contested it and won, seated in June 1896.
Then the 1895 constitution strangled the Black vote with property and literacy tests, and Murray answered with arithmetic: he bought blocks of land and resold farm plots to Black families so they could meet the property qualification and keep the ballot. The state answered him in its own way — a 1905 forgery conviction from an all-white jury in a trial he denounced as discriminatory. He removed to Chicago rather than serve it, and in 1915 the governor of South Carolina pardoned him.
Chicago held his last decades — real estate, insurance, the lecture circuit, and two books, Race Ideals (1914) and Light in Dark Places (1925). He died there on the twenty-first of April 1926, at seventy-two. No African American represented South Carolina in Congress again until 1993. Honored be George Washington Murray, who invented machines for the field and strategies for the franchise.
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