Thomas McCants Stewart

Thomas McCants Stewart (December 28, 1853 – January 7, 1923) was an African American clergyman, lawyer and civil rights leader.
Stewart was born in Charleston, South Carolina on December 28, 1953. In 1874, he became one of the first black students to enroll in the University of South Carolina at Columbia, and he also attended Howard University. He graduated with B.A. and LL.B. degrees, and joined the law firm of South Carolina Congressman Robert B. Elliott. A close friend of Booker T. Washington, Stewart followed his philosophies of self-reliance. He moved to New York in 1880 where he served as pastor of Bethel A.M.E Church in New York and in Weeksville, Brooklyn from 1880 until 1883. He moved to Liberia in 1883, to serve as a professor at Liberia College. He was a participant in the March 5, 1897 meeting to celebrate the memory of Frederick Douglass which founded the American Negro Academy led by Alexander Crummell.After two years, he returned to Brooklyn where he was president of the Brooklyn Literary Union, became active in the Democratic Party, and was a member of the Brooklyn School Board from 1891 until 1894. As a member of the school board, he helped establish P.S. 83 in Weeksville as officially a mixed-race school and the first public school in the country to include an African American (Maritcha Lyons) as supervisor of new teachers. In 1898, Stewart moved to Hawaii, and in 1905 he moved to London. In 1911 he was appointed Associated Justice of the Liberian Supreme Court. His criticism of president Daniel Edward Howard, however, resulted in his removal from the court in 1914. Stewart returned to London, and in 1921 he settled on the Virgin Islands, where he established a legal practice with Christopher Payne. He died in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands in 1923. At his request, he was buried wrapped in the Liberian flag.
Stewart wrote three books, In Memory of Rev. James Morris Williams in 1880, Liberia: the Americo-African Republic: Being Some Impressions of the Climate, Resources, and People, Resulting from Personal Observations and Experiences in West Africa in 1886, and Revised Statutes of the Republic of Liberia: Being a Revision of the Statutes from the Organization of the Government in 1848 to and Including the Acts of the Legislature of 1910-1911 published posthumously in 1928. He also wrote the introduction for and helped publish Rufus L. Perry's The Cushite; or, The Children of Ham (the Negro Race) as Seen by the Ancient Historians and Poets.
He married twice, the second time to Alice Franklin. His son, McCants Stewart, was the first black lawyer in Oregon.