"George Thomas Downing" (December 30 1819- July 21 1903)

Abolitionist,businessman, and civil rights, advocate,the son of Thomas Downing, a restaurant owner, and Rebbecca West. His father's Oyster House was a gathering place for New York's aristocracy and politicians.George attended Charles Smith's school on Orange Street and, with the future black abolitionist J McCune Crummell, and Charles Reason and Patrick Reason, the African School on Mulberry Street. He completed his school privately and in his midteens was active in two literary societies.Before he was twenty he participated in the Underground Railroad and worked with his father to lobby the New York legislature for equal suffrage. In 1841 both were delegates to the initial convention of the American Reform Board of Disenfranchised Commissioners,one of the many organizations formed by African American men to fight for the elective franchise in New York.That same year he married Serena Leanora de Grasse, the daughter of a German mother and a father from India.She attended Clinton Seminary in Clinton,New York,and spent vacations at the home of a classmate, the daughter of the white political abolitionist Gerrit Smith;it was here that George courted her.He started his own restaurant in 1842 in New York. In the summer of 1846 he opened a branch of his father's restaurant in Newport, Rhode Island;four years later he began a catering business in Providence.He set down roots in Newport in 1855 when he built the Sea Girth House, a luxurious summer resort for whites only. He traveled extensively, lived in Providence and Boston before the Civil War, and managed the House of Representatives dining room in Washington, D.C.,during  and after the Civil War Newport was his home.Outside of his real estate, catering, and restaurant interests, George devoted himself to activism. An early abolitionist, he participated in several rescues of fugitive slaves, including the famous cases of James Hamlet and Anthony Burns.He zealously asserted the right of black children to equal education and was a member of the first board of trustees of the New York Society for the Promotion of Education among Colored Children, founded in 1847. In 1857 he began and financed a successful nine-year campaign to integrate the schools of Rhode Island's three major cities, Providence, Newport, and Bristol.George expressed reservations about manual labor school proposal by Frederick Douglass,in part because it was racially exclusive.His opposition to efforts by the largely White American Colonization Society to persuade blacks to migrate to Liberia was both persistent and passionate.He believed blacks should stay and fight for their  freedom. When Henry Highland Garnet formed a parallel black African Civilization Society to encouraged emigration, George led a bitter fight to neutralize its efforts, using parliamentary maneuvers, personal attacks, and threats of violence in the conventions of 1859, 1860, and 1864.In 1860, over the protests of Boston officials, George and a handful of black leaders held a large meeting honoring the first anniversary of John Brown's death.The Civil War raised the question of enlisting black troops;before recruiting, George secured from the Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew a pledge that there would be equality of treatment "in every particular" for black soldiers.During and after the war he supported Senator Charles Sumner's attempts to advance civil rights and was instrumental in removing the color ban from the gallery of the U.S. Senate.In A well-publicized 1866 interview of a dozen black leaders with President Andrew Johnson, George told the president that they had come as "friends, meeting a friend...We are in a passage to equality before the law."He asked for legislation to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment and for the right to vote.To do less, he said"will be a disregard of our just rights,"Andrew reply was long, rambling,and negative, but over the next decade the Fourteenth and Fifteenth  amendments and the 1875 Civil Rights Act gave a fleeting taste of victory.While George never lost his fervor for equal rights, he maintained his interest in economic affairs.His real estate holdings in 1856-1857 were valued at $6,800.Shortly after the war, he tried without success to create "a great mercantile house" in New York and"establish business relations"with the South.He was a key figure in organizing the Colored National Labor Union in 1869 and served as the first convention's temporary chair and the union's initial vice president.He condemned the racial intransigence of the White National Labor Union and urged freedmen to seek loans,not donations, from northern capitalists to underwrite their business efforts.His ties to the Republican Party began to loosen as early 1869, when he told Colored National Labor Union convention that the party deserved "respect and support," but it "should have been more consistent, more positive" in confronting the race's "enemies." He predicted that after the ratification of the fifteenth Amendment the party's "adhesive element" would dissipate and new issues such as labor would emerge.His 1873 attack on Rhode Island Republicans for blocking the the repeal of a law against racial intermarriage-he believed that race blending would eradicate barriers and once wrote,"The world has no such beauties as are the product of the AfroicoAmerican with other races in America"-provoked charges of apostasy from both races.George support for the 1879 Exodusters challenged Frederick Douglass and chastised the Republician president Rutherford B. Hayes for a failed southern policy.The Kansas migrants from Louisiana and Mississippi were victims of southern oppression, he affirmed, because the South "is not ready to accept...equality before the law for all men."The next decade saw George firmly in the Democratic camp. He favored Grover Cleveland for president in 1884 and,with Democratic support, tried three times without success to win a Rhode Island legislative seat, and effort that nevertheless weakened "the blind adhesion of the colored people to one party." When SEnator William Sprague was elected governor in 1887, he recognized George support by appointing him to the state prison commission and to an ad hoc committee of leading citizens.He retired from business in the early 1880s, financially secure and recognized as "one of the institutions of Newport."He devoted his time to his dogs and his collections of memorabilia. He told a friend in 1899 that his writing aimed "to force the inevitable on prejudiced Americans."He died at home in Newport.