Josiah T. Walls

Josiah Thomas Walls was born on the thirtieth of December, 1842, at Winchester, Virginia, into the bondage of slavery. The records of his parentage did not survive; he entered the world, as so many did, without a name written for his mother or his father, though tradition long held that his own enslaver may have been his father. From that unpromising beginning rose one of the notable statesmen of the Reconstruction era.

During the Civil War he was compelled to labor for the Confederate army until Union forces captured him at Yorktown in 1862. In 1863 he enlisted of his own will in the United States Colored Troops, rising to the rank of first sergeant. Mustered out in Florida, he settled in Alachua County, where he taught school, farmed, and, through self-tutoring and what early learning he could gather, prepared himself for public life.

A Republican, Walls was elected to the United States House of Representatives and took his seat on the fourth of March, 1871 — the first African American to represent the state of Florida in Congress. He served across parts of three terms, twice seeing his election contested and overturned, and he also served four terms in the Florida Senate, laboring for public education and the rights of the freedmen.

In his later years he farmed near Tallahassee and taught at what is now Florida A&M University, until his passing on the fifteenth of May, 1905. From a birth without a recorded name, he rose to write his own into the history of a nation. May his courage and his labor be honored.