| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Black Congressman in the Age of Jim Crow: South Carolina's George Washington Murray. By John F. Marszalek. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. xx, 211 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-3002-1.)
This slim volume is a political biography of George Washington Murray that illustrates the complexities of post-Reconstruction politics in South Carolina. John F. Marszalek has made the most of limited resources available on Murray's life to piece together Murray's story and that of the fate of the Republican party in South Carolina in the late nineteenth century. His goal is to rehabilitate Murray's reputation and that of the state Republican party to show that it was largely white racism that led to the party's problems, not its venality or political squabbling.	1
Murray, born a slave in 1853, worked his way up to the apex of state politics in true Booker T. Washington style, espousing conservative views on race. Elected to Congress in 1890, ironically through the support of Ben Tillman's faction in an election dispute, Murray faced controversy and political chicanery in his home state that more often than not kept him away from the House of Representatives. In 1905, following a judgment against him for forgery stemming from a lawsuit, he fled to Chicago and spent the rest of his life lecturing and teaching.	. . .

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