Description
T. McCants Stewart was born into a relatively privileged family in Charleston, South Carolina that could afford to give him a pretty good secondary school education. He received his law degree from the University of South Carolina at Columbia in 1875 and moved north a few years later. Immersing himself in both national and local politics, Stewart was one of several prominent black New Yorkers who became disillusioned with the Republican Party in the last decades of the nineteenth-century, and for a period of time switched allegiance to the Democratic Party. After Philip White's death in 1891, then Mayor Seth Low appointed Stewart to succeed Philip on the Brooklyn Board of Education.
Rights
Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations