Charles P. Head (Warren County)
State House: 1870-1871
Born: c. 1840 in Mississippi
Head represented Mississippi at the National Convention of Colored Men in Syracuse, New York, in October 1864. Frederick Douglass was elected president and spoke at that convention, at which Head was named a vice-president and appointed to the business committee.
Head, wife Louisa, and five children are recorded on the 1880 census on Magnolia Ave. in Vicksburg, with “laborer” given as Head’s occupation. The 1870 census also records a Head family in Vicksburg; though the head of house is listed with initials E. (possibly C.) and something illegible, all the information for the wife and children matches. The occupation for the man on the 1870 census, who is almost certainly Charles P. Head, is listed as “slaughterer.” On the 1900 census, a Charles Head of appropriate age, occupation “preacher,” is living in Hinds County with a wife named Emma. Emma Head is a widow on the 1910 census; she died in 1933. Charles P. Head’s estimated birth year on census records ranges from 1835-1843, which is where I’ve drawn the 1840 for his approximate birth date.
“In August 1865, he and five other men recommended that, in order to establish schools, the Freedmen’s Bureau institute a tax on Vicksburg blacks who could afford to pay it and that blacks appoint a committee to manage their children’s education… A lay leader in the Mississippi Conference of the Northern Methodist Church, he devoted himself to religious affairs after the end of Reconstruction.”
(Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction, 1993)
Links:
Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men
Mississippi State Convention of Colored Men, 1865
