“John Roy Lynch had an Irish father and an enslaved mother. By the law of the South before the Civil War, that made John Roy and his brother half Irish and all slave.”

John Roy Lynch was a field slave who became a photographer, then Justice of the Peace, then Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, and then a U.S. Representative. His climb from slavery to Congress is chronicled in Chris Barton’s book, The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch.

Reconstruction (and the Gilded Age that followed it) are a rather neglected time period in American history for children, especially as it pertains to books set in the South. I have two shelves of books on the Civil War in my library, where the books, historical fiction and nonfiction, are shelved in chronological order. Between 1866 and the beginning of the twentieth century, I do have a shelf full of books, but none of them are set in the South. Most of the books that have to do with that time period are all about prairie settlers, cowboys, and heading west. Even the textbooks dance past Reconstruction with a little information about Andrew Johnson’s impeachment and black codes and then take a sharp turn immediately westward.

Mr. Barton’s picture book biography of one of the first black men to serve as a Representative to the U.S. House of Representatives, from the great state of Mississippi, fills a hole in the living history books available to children and fills it well. The text is simple, but honest, and it doesn’t gloss over the fact that the Klan was active and the Civil War was not really over in a sense during the time that John Roy Lynch served as a U.S. Representative. The basic information about the difficulties of slavery and its aftermath, terrorism and persecution for black people, is conveyed in story form, making those facts both more horrible (these things happened to real people!) and more understandable and even hopeful (brave and intelligent people tried to make things better) at the same time.

John Roy Lynch himself is an inspiring and admirable character. He pursued an education in his “spare time” and taught himself by eavesdropping on a school across the alleyway. He became a photographer by way of on-the-job training. He taught himself the law so that he could be a just Justice of the Peace. He became a landowner, and then a public servant in the state legislature, then in the U.S. House. And he did all of these things while he was still in his twenties.

Although Congressman Lynch was defeated for re-election in 1876 as Reconstruction came to a close and the South returned to a new era of black subjugation and disenfranchisement, his words continued to inspire, and he “continued to believe that the laws of this land could bring about justice.”

“When every man, woman, and child can feel that his, her, and their rights are fully protected by the strong arm of a generous and grateful Republic, then we can all truthfully say that this beautiful land of ours, over which the Star Spangled Banner so triumphantly waves, is, in truth and in fact, the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave.'” ~John Roy Lynch, 1874