Later Life
After his brief governorship, Pinchback remained active in politics and public service. In the elections of 1874 and 1876, Pinchback was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and then the U.S. Senate respectively; he was the state's first African-American representative to Congress. Both election results were contested by Democratic opponents, as the campaigns and elections were surrounded by violence and intimidation. Congress, then dominated by Democrats, finally seated his opponents. This period marked the beginning of a reversal of the political gains which African Americans had achieved since the war's end. The White League, a paramilitary group with chapters across the state beginning in 1874, openly disrupted Republican gatherings and intimidated blacks to repress their vote. A historian described the White League as the "military arm of the Democratic Party."
Pinchback served on the Louisiana State Board of Education and was instrumental in 1880 in establishing Southern University, a historically black college in New Orleans. It relocated to Baton Rouge in 1914. He was a member of Southern University's Board of Trustees (later redesignated the Board of Supervisors).
In 1882, Republican President Chester A. Arthur appointed Pinchback as Surveyor of Customs in New Orleans.
In 1885, he studied law at Straight University, which later became Dillard University, in New Orleans. He was admitted to the Louisiana bar in 1886.
In 1892 Pinchback was part of the Comité des Citoyens (Citizens' Committee) which set up the New Orleans civil-rights actions of Homer Plessy as a challenge of segregationist laws in public transportation. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court as Plessy v. Ferguson. It was decided in favor of state laws requiring racial segregation in public transport.
Later Pinchback moved with his family to New York City, where he worked as a Marshal. Finally he moved to Washington, D.C., where he practiced law. He and his family were part of the mixed-race elite in Washington, generally people who had been free before the Civil War and had gained educations.
Pinchback died in Washington in 1921 and is interred in Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans.
Read more about this topic: P. B. S. Pinchback
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