Tags: Congressman.
John Roy Lynch (September 10 1847 – November 2 1939) was an American politician writer attorney and military officer. Born into slavery he became free in 1863. In 1873 he was elected as the first African-American Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives. During Reconstruction after the American Civil War he was among the first generation of African Americans elected to the U.S House of Representatives serving 1874-1877 and again in the 1880s.
