John Roy Lynch (10 September 1847-2 November 1939) was a member of the US House of Representatives (R-MS 6) from 4 March 1873 to 4 March 1877 (preceding Henry Smith Van Eaton) and from 29 April 1882 to 4 March 1883 (succeeding James R. Chalmers and preceding Van Eaton).
Biography[]
John Roy Lynch was born in slavery on the Tacony Plantation near Vidalia, Louisiana in 1847, the son of an Irish immigrant overseer and his African-American common-law wife. Patrick planned to buy his wife and sons from his master, as he genuinely loved them, but a new owner bought the plantation and hired a different manager before the transaction could be completed. In 1863, the family was freed under the Emancipation Proclamation, and Lynch became involved in the Republican Party during Reconstruction. Governor Adelbert Ames appointed Lynch as a justice of the peace in Natchez in July 1869, and he served several years in the state legislature and became its first black Speaker in 1873. He then served in the US House of Representatives from 1873 to 1877 and from 1882 to 1883, but, amid increasing restrictions on black voting rights in his state, he moved to Washington DC and became a lawyer. He was admitted to the Mississippi bar in 1896 and served as a US Army major during the Spanish-American War, and he then became a lawyer and real estate agent in Chicago for two decades after the war. He died in Chicago in 1939 at the age of 92.