Jesse Beauregard Colbert

Jesse Beauregard Colbert, also known as J. B. Colbert, was born on June 28, 1861, in Lancaster County, South Carolina, to Tillman and Sarah Colbert. According to the 1870 census, Colbert lived in a family of farm laborers. According to his African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church biography, he attended Lancaster High School and enrolled at Livingstone College at the age of 21. In 1883, he was a part of the first graduating class of the college and gave the valedictory speech.¹ He joined the A. M. E. Zion Church and preached across several churches in South Carolina from 1885 to 1890, including at Indian Hill Circuit, Rock Hill, and Fort Lawn. In 1889, he married Margaret A. Davis, a fellow Livingstone College graduate, in Salisbury, North Carolina.² In 1890, he moved to Derby, Connecticut, to oversee Zion Church. While in Derby, he took courses at the Yale Divinity School as a resident licentiate for the 1890-1891 school year.³ He continued to work as a secretary to the A. M. E. Church.

In 1892, Colbert was reassigned to the First and Second African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Providence, Rhode Island.⁴ In a congregation in Washington, D.C., he preached against the continued lynchings occurring in the South and the Christian imperative to denounce them.⁵ In 1896, he was made editor of the Varick Christian Endeavor and president of the Varick Christian Endeavor Society, where, by his second year, he enrolled over 10,000 members and oversaw 250 chapters.⁶ During the 1900s, he became a presiding elder and pastored over the Metropolitan A. M. E. Zion Church in St. Louis, Missouri, before permanently moving to Louisville, Kentucky, by 1911 where he was presiding elder for the city.⁷

Alongside his role as minister, he passed the bar in Franklin County and practiced law in Louisville.⁸ Initially a Republican, he was disillusioned by the Republican political machine and the party’s antipathy to Black voters. Colbert and other prominent African Americans created the Lincoln Independent Party in 1921. In a statement made to The Hartford Herald:

“We regard the organization of the Independent Lincoln party as the greatest step taken by the colored people in Louisville for political freedom since their emancipation. In fact it is nothing more or less than our second emancipation, one that is destined to make us free indeed, for it will give us the power of autonomy, which is the right of all free men.”⁹

He was nominated for Congress for the Lincoln Independent Party in the 1922 elections.¹⁰ However, the party disbanded by 1922 after reaching a compromise with the Republican Party. He also was a member of Louisville’s NAACP chapter, where he helped write a historical report on Louisville segregation cases. Alongside his law practice, he was an editor of the Louisville Columbian, and worked for the National Employment Bureau and the National Colored Teachers’ Agency.¹¹

He died on December 14, 1936, in Louisville, Kentucky, of pneumonia.¹² The flag at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Louisville was flown at half-mast in commemoration of his passing with eulogies given by local notables.¹³ He is buried in Louisville’s Greenwood Cemetery.