In 1904, George Edwin Taylor Became the First Black Presidential Candidate. 104 Years Later, Barack Obama Won.

George Edwin Taylor doesn't show up in most history books. But in 1904, he became the first African American to run for president as the nominee of a national political party.

He ran on the National Negro Liberty Party ticket—a party created by and for Black Americans who were fed up with both Republicans and Democrats refusing to protect their rights.

Taylor was born in Arkansas in 1857 to an enslaved father and a free mother. Two years later, Arkansas passed a law forcing all free Black people to leave the state. His mother fled with him to Illinois, where she died when he was just five years old. He spent years homeless, sleeping in crates along the riverfront.

Eventually, he made his way to Wisconsin and then Iowa, where he became a journalist, editor, and political organizer. He fought for labor rights. He served as a local judge. He refused to pick a party just because that's what Black voters were supposed to do.

By 1904, he'd had enough. The Democrats were enacting Jim Crow laws across the South. The Republicans weren't doing anything to stop them. So Taylor and others formed the National Negro Liberty Party and built a platform that demanded what should have already been guaranteed: equal rights under the Constitution, reparations for formerly enslaved people, an end to disenfranchisement.

Taylor knew he wouldn't win. He received fewer than 2,000 votes.

But he ran anyway. Because someone had to show it could be done.

Sixty-eight years later, Shirley Chisholm would run for the Democratic nomination. More than a century later, Barack Obama would become president.

George Edwin Taylor didn't live to see either of those moments. But he built part of the road that made them possible.