George Ruby

George T. Ruby was a prominent black Republican leader in Reconstruction-era Texas. He served in the 1868-69 constitutional convention, the Texas senate, and as a delegate to two Republican national conventions. He earned a reputation as an educator of Louisiana blacks

Career

Ruby was born in New York City in 1841. His parents were probably the Rev. Ebenezer Ruby and Jemima Ruby, though their son would claim that his father was an aristocratic white man.[1]

From early in life, Ruby lived just outside Portland, Maine, where he had his schooling. Coming to Boston in 1860, he was hired as a correspondent on the Pine and Palm, run by James Redpath, and sent as a correspondent to the island of Haiti. Redpath's journal was issued on behalf of a movement encouraging African-American colonization in Haiti, a plan which resulted in disastrous failure in 1862, at which time Ruby returned to the United States.

In January 1864, he moved to Louisiana and began teaching school, first in a Baptist church in New Orleans and then, as the Union occupation force expanded its educational efforts into the hinterland, in St. Bernard's Parish. The army dropped its responsibility for schooling at the war's end, but the American Missionary Association needed teachers, and Ruby worked for them in New Orleans, and, when the Freedmen's Bureau schools started up, became a teacher there. In 1866, he went to Jacksboro in East Feliciana Parish to open a Bureau school there. A white mob attacked him and tried to drive him out.[2]

Texas politics

In September, 1866, with Louisiana schools shutting down for lack of funding, Ruby left for Texas. The Freedmen's Bureau agent assigned him as agent and teacher in Galveston. (This was not an unusual choice; many black teachers with experience in Louisiana emigrated to Texas, where their past association assured them that they would not be wholly alone in their new surroundings). Working to set up and run schools for blacks, he also helped organize the Union Leagues on which mobilization for the newly created Republican party would depend. In time he became state president of the league and editor of the Galveston Standard, a newspaper that, like many Republican papers, only lasted briefly. Provisional Governor Elisha M. Pease made him a notary public in Galveston, and when the elections took place for a constitutional convention, Ruby was chosen for the district comprising Brazoria, Galveston, and Matagorda counties. There he acted with the more radical end of the party, and was so deeply disturbed by the conservative compromises in the final document that for some months he worked to have it defeated or rejected by the national government. In the end, he accepted it as the best that could be done, if a Republican government was to survive at all, and on Republican government, he believed, all prospect of equal rights depended.[3][4]

Talked about as a possible running-mate for Republican gubernatorial nominee Edmund J. Davis, Ruby really had no chance. He was twenty-eight at the time, far younger than would have been the norm, and in Texas as in most of the other Reconstructed states, any black candidate would be sure to drive away white votes—and, with the party dangerously split, the Radical Republican faction needed every vote it could get. But Ruby was elected to the state senate in a very close vote, where he served in 1870-71 and in 1873. There he pressed hard for bills protecting the freedpeople's civil rights, including a measure opening public conveyances to all, regardless of race—a bill that white members made sure never came to a vote. At the same time, with an eye to his largely white constituency, Ruby introduced bills incorporating railroads radiating out of Galveston, including several transcontinental projects like the Southern Pacific and the International & Great Northern. Railroad aid was not a win-win deal; money or lands appropriated to help out their projects came at the expense of other needs that the state had, like a well-financed public school system.[5]

With close connections to labor organizations in Galveston and as president of the Texas Colored Labor Convention in 1869, Ruby's influence stretched far beyond Galveston and his ability to mobilize Republican voters along the Gulf Coast and black voters everywhere in Texas.[6] "In the post-Civil War era no black man in Texas exercised more political power than did George Thompson Ruby," one of his biographers would comment. "An astute politician, Ruby built a base of power in the black community of Galveston, then used that support to make himself a major force in the state at large. He was a forceful advocate of civil and political rights for his race, but he knew when to compromise to gain his larger goals, and he moved carefully among hostile white politicians in his efforts to expand opportunities for black people.".[7]

With the return of the Democrats to power in 1874, Ruby returned to Louisiana. He found work on the New Orleans "Louisianian," a black Republican newspaper edited by Louisiana's former lieutenant-governor, Pinckney B. S. Pinchback. The government provided him with a job in the New Orleans custom-house, but Ruby's main occupation was newspaper work. He remained on Pinchback's paper until 1878 and then became editor of the New Orleans Observer, a paper of his own through the 1880 election. After its demise, he began the New Orleans Republic. In the late 1870s, he became a strong supporter of the Exoduster movement.

Still an influential spokesperson for black interests in Louisiana, he died on October 31, 1882 of malaria at his home on Euterpe Street, New Orleans.[8]

Notes

  1. ↑ Carl H. Moneyhon, "George T. Ruby and the Politics of Expediency in Texas," in Howard N. Rabinowitz, ed., Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 363.
  2. ↑ Moneyhon, "George T. Ruby and the Politics of Expediency in Texas," p. 364.
  3. ↑ Eric Foner, Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1996), 187
  4. ↑ Moneyhon, "George T. Ruby and the Politics of Expediency in Texas," pp 370-71.
  5. ↑ Moneyhon, "George T. Ruby and the Politics of Expediency in Texas," pp 380-82.
  6. ↑ Eric Foner, Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1996), 187.
  7. ↑ Moneyhon, "George T. Ruby and the Politics of Expediency in Texas," p 363.
  8. ↑ Moneyhon, "George T. Ruby and the Politics of Expediency in Texas," p 363.

Further reading

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