John William Randolph (Sunflower/Leflore Counties)
State House: 1874-1875
Born: February 1853 in Roanoke, VA
Died: April 6, 1927 in Pass Christian, MS
Appointed to be circuit and chancery clerk in Sunflower County in 1875. Listed on the 1880 census in Leflore County with wife Mary Ellen (maiden name Berry) and sons Joseph and Oliver. Sometime in the 1890s, he relocated to Pass Christian, where he served as a public school principal for many years. Randolph continued to attend Republican political conventions, both state and national, into the early 1900s. He is listed with Mary Ellen on the 1900, 1910, and 1920 census in Pass Christian. The J. W. Randolph School was named in his honor. He is buried in Pass Christian’s Live Oak Cemetery.
Joseph Randolph (1875-1961) went on to serve as the president of HBCUs Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson University) in Austin, TX, and Claflin University in Orangeburg, SC. There is a brief biography of him in Harmon’s Encyclopedia of World Methodism Vol 2 (1974).
Oliver Randolph (1877-1951) was the first African American admitted to the New Jersey bar, the second to be elected to the NJ state legislature, and the first Black federal prosecutor from NJ.
According to a 1947 article about Oliver, John W. Randolph’s father was named Joseph and was enslaved in Virginia before buying his freedom shortly before the Civil War.
Links:
Memorial on Find A Grave
Video about the restoration of the J. W. Randolph School
Trailblazer: Assistant U. S. Attorney Oliver Randolph
