Richard H. Cain

Richard Harvey Cain was born on April 12, 1825, in Greenbrier County, Virginia (now West Virginia), the son of a Black father and a Cherokee mother. Raised in the free state of Ohio, at Gallipolis, he was permitted to learn to read and write, and he answered an early call to the ministry. He studied for a time at Wilberforce University and entered the African Methodist Episcopal Church, whose gospel of freedom and self-help he would carry the rest of his life.

Ordained in the AME connection, Cain pastored in the North, including Brooklyn, and joined the abolitionist current alongside figures such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany. In May 1865 he was sent south as superintendent of AME missions in South Carolina, where he built Charleston's Emanuel AME Church into a congregation of more than two thousand and purchased a newspaper he renamed the Missionary Record, giving newly freed Carolinians a voice of their own.

Cain became one of the towering figures of Reconstruction. He sat in the 1868 constitutional convention, served in the South Carolina Senate from 1868 to 1870, and helped found the freedmen's town of Lincolnville. Twice elected to the United States House of Representatives, serving 1873–1875 and 1877–1879, he labored above all for the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the nation's first federal public-accommodations law.

In 1880 he was among the first men elected bishop of the AME Church from the South, given charge of the episcopal district of Louisiana and Texas, where he founded and presided over Paul Quinn College at Waco. He moved to Washington, D.C., and died there on January 18, 1887. Preacher, editor, senator, congressman, and bishop, Richard Harvey Cain spent every station he held building doors through which his people could walk free. His memory is honored.