Thomas Cardozo


Thomas Whitmarsh Cardozo was an educator, journalist, and public official during the Reconstruction Era in the United States. He served as State Superintendent of Education in Mississippi and is the first African American to have held the position.

Early life

Thomas Cardozo was born free in Charleston, South Carolina in 1838. His father, Isaac Nunez Cardozo, was part of a well-known Jewish family and was a weigher in the U.S. Customs House of Charleston for 24 years, until his death in 1855. Thomas's mother was Lydia Weston, a freed slave of mixed ancestry who was a seamstress. He had two older brothers, Henry Cardozo and Francis Lewis Cardozo, and at least one older sister, Eslanda.
In Charleston, Thomas was among the "free-Negro elite" and went to private schools for free black children, mainly taught by free black teachers. He was also taught by his father Isaac and his uncle Jacob Cardozo, who was an economist and newspaper publisher.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the secession movement caused free people of color to be concerned about being enslaved. When Isaac Cardozo died during this worsening time, Thomas's family lost their protector. Thomas was 17 at the time and became an apprentice in a company that manufactured rice-threshing machines.
In 1857, two years after his father's death, Thomas's mother moved to Ohio and he moved to New York where he continued his education. At the Newburgh Collegiate Institute, he took academic courses and trained to be a teacher. Before he could graduate, civil war broke out and he began teaching in 1861. He married Laura J. Williams, a teacher and accomplished musician who was from a mixed-race family in Brooklyn. Thomas and Laura became parents with a son born in 1863 and another in 1865.

Career in education

Shortly after the beginning of the American Civil War, Cardozo began teaching in New York. A few years later in April 1865 at the end of the war, Thomas and his family moved from Flushing, New York back to his home town of Charleston, South Carolina. There he supervised educational efforts for the American Missionary Association.
In the challenging turmoil of the weeks following the end of the Civil War, he supervised the AMA's educational activities in Charleston. He obtained building space and books. He supervised teachers, hired new teachers, and ran the AMA house for teachers who came down from the north. All this was in the context of disputes between the various aid agencies there. Thomas was the first AMA school principal in Charleston at the Tappan School.
This path towards success ended when the AMA became aware of a previous affair that the married Thomas Cardozo had with a female student of his in New York. Also, the AMA was dissatisfied with his accounting of his expenditures back then and suspected that some of the expenditures went to the young woman. The AMA asked his brother Francis to discuss this with him in Charleston. Francis reported back that Thomas had the affair through "weakness", had “not been deliberately wicked”, and didn't misappropriate any AMA funds. Thomas asked for forgiveness. The AMA replaced Thomas with his brother Francis Cardozo around September 1865.
Thomas stayed in Charleston and became a grocer for a few months until his store burnt down. He moved to Baltimore, Maryland where he and his wife taught at the Negro Industrial School for a short time. When the school lost its funding in 1866, he and his family moved to Syracuse, New York. They returned to the South in 1869 where he and his wife opened a normal school in Elizabeth City, North Carolina the following year.

Career in politics

In 1871, Thomas Cardozo and his family moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi where his wife wanted to live because she had relatives there. He thought there would be good opportunities for teaching and later politics. Previously in New York, he had written in the National Anti-Slavery Standard about the place for blacks in the evolving political situation of reconstruction.
Because of the demographics of Mississippi, public office for Cardozo was a good possibility after satisfying the six-month residency requirement. He joined the, was elected circuit court clerk of Warren County and took office on January 1, 1872. He wrote accounts of his experiences in Mississippi, including descriptions of his fellow Republican politicians, for the New National Era under the pseudonym "Civis". He was a delegate to the 1873 National Civil Rights Convention in Washington, D.C.
In November 1873, Cardozo was elected State Superintendent of Education in Mississippi, along with the election of Governor Adelbert Ames, Lieutenant Governor Alexander K. Davis and Secretary of State James Hill. Cardozo proposed uniform textbooks for Mississippi schools during his tenure. Although he was the first African-American to hold the post, Cardozo did not challenge the de facto racial segregation that existed in Mississippi schools.
In August 1874, white conservatives took over the Vicksburg city government and Cardozo was charged with crimes while he was circuit court clerk in 1872. First he was charged with receiving money for falsified witness certificates and then additionally charged with embezzling money paid by land owners for redeeming land taken by the government for unpaid taxes. He appeared before a magistrate on September 7, 1874 and bond was posted. He was indicted in November 1874 and tried beginning May 6, 1875. The jury failed to reach a verdict. He was able to get the retrial moved from Vicksburg to Jackson with a new trial date in July 1876.
After the first trial there were ongoing political attacks by conservatives that turned into violence. On July 4, 1875 in Vicksburg, a white mob attacked a meeting where Cardozo was to speak, followed by street violence where several blacks were killed or injured. City officials helped Cardozo, the main target of the attacks, escape from the city.
The occupying Union Army began to withdraw from the South in 1875 in the last years of the Reconstruction era. Conservative white Democrats had regained control of the Mississippi state legislature by a program of violence and intimidation against Republican black voters. The legislators brought impeachment charges against Cardozo and senate impeachment proceedings began February 11, 1876. Superintendent Cardozo was granted permission to resign with the charges against him dismissed, and submitted his resignation on March 22, 1876.
Leaving the politics, an upcoming trial in Jackson in July 1876, and the dangerous situation in Mississippi, Cardozo moved to Newton, Massachusetts. There he worked for the postal service until his death in 1881. He was forty-two. Thomas Cardozo Middle School in Jackson, Mississippi is named for him and opened in 2010.