Isaiah Thornton Montgomery (May 21, 1847 – March 5, 1924) was founder of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, an all-black community. A Republican, he was a delegate to the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention and served as mayor of Mound Bayou.
He participated in the 1890 Mississippi constitutional convention as a delegate from Bolivar County and voted for the adoption of a state constitution that effectively disfranchised black voters for decades, using poll taxes and literacy tests to raise barriers to voter registration.[1][2] Montgomery promoted an accommodationist position for African Americans. The I. T. Montgomery House in Mound Bayou is a National Landmark.
He has been described as "Mississippi's Booker T. Washington".[3]
Born into slavery, Isaiah and his older brother William Thornton Montgomery were the sons of Ben Montgomery, a slave whose owner, Joseph Davis, promoted him to overseer. The Montgomery children learned to read and write due to their father's influential position on the Davis Bend plantation. Davis wanted to establish a more positive working environment for slaves and encouraged education.[4]
Following the end of the American Civil War, Isaiah began a business with his father. It lasted until Ben's death in 1877. His father had long dreamed of establishing an independent black colony; by the time of his death, the Reconstruction era had ended and African Americans struggled to maintain themselves against white supremacists.
Montgomery married Martha Robb; their daughter Mary Cordelia Montgomery Booze was a political organizer.[5]
After his father's death in 1877, Isaiah Montgomery worked to realize his father's dream. With his cousin Benjamin T. Green, he bought property in the northwest frontier of Mississippi Delta bottomlands to found Mound Bayou in 1887. Bolivar County was the largest in area in the Delta. As farmers cleared land, they started cultivating cotton.
Montgomery worked to gain freedmen protection of the law, and to keep their work and lives separate from supervision by whites.
Montgomery attended Mississippi's 1890 constitutional convention as its only black or Republican delegate. Convened in Jackson in August, the convention drafted a new constitution which was designed to secure white domination of state politics, including the adoption of an "understanding clause" which required any prospective voter to be able to read and interpret any section of the state constitution.[6] With little ability to challenge it, Montgomery accepted the clause, arguing that while it was "apparently one of unfriendliness" to blacks it was in the public interest to prevent illiterates from voting.[7]
In what the Washington Post termed "A Notable Address Delivered by the Colored Statesman," Frederick Douglass gave a speech in October 1890 before the Bethel Literary and Historical SocietyofWashington, D.C.'s Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. He strongly condemned Montgomery's stance regarding suffrage in Mississippi. Douglass had spoken of Montgomery numerous times before and on the occasion cited his position as an act of "treason, to the cause of the colored people, not only of his own state, but of the United States," referring to the effect Montgomery's act would have in other states. He also lamented having heard in Montgomery "a groan of bitter anguish born of oppression and despair" and a voice of a "soul from which all hope had vanished."[8][9]
I. T. Montgomery Elementary School of the North Bolivar Consolidated School District (formerly the Mound Bayou School District) is named after Montgomery.[10]
Signatories of the Mississippi Constitution
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Convention President |
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Adams County |
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Alcorn County |
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Alcorn and Prentiss counties |
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Amite County |
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Amite and Pike counties |
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Attala County |
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Benton County |
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Benton and Tippah counties |
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Bolivar County |
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Calhoun County |
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Carroll County |
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Chickasaw County |
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Choctaw County |
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Claiborne County |
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Clarke County |
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Clay County |
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Coahoma County |
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Copiah County |
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Covington County |
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DeSoto County |
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Franklin County |
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Greene County |
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Grenada County |
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Hancock County |
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Harrison County |
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Hinds County |
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Holmes County |
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Issaquena County |
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Itawamba County |
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Jackson County |
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Jasper County |
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Jefferson County |
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Jones County |
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Kemper County |
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Lafayette County |
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Lauderdale County |
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Lauderdale, Kemper, and Clarke counties |
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Lawrence County |
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Leake County |
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Leake and Newton counties |
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Lee County |
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Leflore County |
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Lincoln County |
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Lincoln and Jefferson counties |
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Lowndes County |
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Madison County |
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Marshall County |
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Monroe County |
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Montgomery County |
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Neshoba County |
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Newton County |
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Noxubee County |
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Oktibbeha County |
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Panola County |
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Perry County |
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Pike County |
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Pontotoc County |
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Prentiss County |
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Quitman County |
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Rankin County |
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Scott County |
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Sharkey County |
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Simpson County |
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Smith County |
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Sunflower County |
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Tallahatchie County |
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Tate County |
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Tippah County |
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Tishomingo County |
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Tunica County |
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Union County |
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Warren County |
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Washington County |
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Wayne County |
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Wilkinson County |
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Winston County |
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Yalobusha County |
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Yazoo County |
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Yazoo and Holmes counties |
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State at large |
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Attest signature to marginal note |
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International |
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National |
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