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Cleveland’s First Elected Official of African Descent
By Suzanne Parks, MEDL
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The Early Years of Cleveland’s First Elected Official of African Descent, John Patterson Green
Depending upon who you ask or which resource you access your information from, there are many who are credited with the establishment of Labor Day. But in the State of Ohio, the “Daddy of Labor Day,” was a black man by the name of John Patterson Green.
A Negro, Green hailed from New Bern, North Carolina during slavery times. Born in 1845, he was the son of free persons of color. However, in North Carolina, whether born free, enslaved, manumitted, well to do, impoverished, aware of one’s lineage or not; educated, illiterate, and regardless of one’s skin tone varying from blue-black to white likeness, life was perilous for persons with African DNA. And not unlike today, there was this constant quest to become meritorious in spite of unrelenting oppression based upon one’s genetic composition.
John Patterson Green was the grandson of a man by the name of John Wright Stanly (sometimes spelled Stanley), who was a man of noble British birth and later a privateer who owned a fleet of 14 merchant ships, which were commissioned by the patriots during the American Revolution. Because of his war efforts, the English Crown placed a bounty upon his head, as if he were a pirate, which is what a privateer is before being commissioned by a government, to further their cause. Fabulously wealthy, he once loaned General Nathaniel Greene during a despairing period during the American Revolution when things we not going well, forty thousand pounds, in order to strengthen the war effort. This sum is worth $1,224,800 in today’s market. Greene nor the new government repaid him. But JW Stanly and his descendants can claim they are true sons and daughters of the American Revolution.
JW Stanly’s son and heir, John Stanly became a renowned lawyer and a savvy politician in North Carolina and within the federal government. He served seven consecutive terms in the North Carolina House of Representatives, was Speaker of the House and served as a member of Congress. John Stanly was also a scoundrel of sort because he killed Richard Dobbs Speight,a member of the Democratic-Republican Party and one of the signers of the Constitution, during a duel. Speight at the time was the governor of North Carolina.
Stanly was later pardoned.by Governor Benjamin Williams. In those days as well as today, John Patterson Green is a reputed descendent of these two European-Americans, great-grandson and grandson respectively. Much like the Hemings of Thomas Jefferson fame, John Green who was John Patterson Green’s father was the son born of an enslaved woman, which means he was born into slavery. He was later manumitted and became a tailor by trade.
Stanly summoned John Green to his death bed where he acknowledged paternity and gifted John Green with a steel engraved portrait of himself. But John Green was never legally legitimized as one of John Stanley’s heirs.
John Patterson Green’s grandmother, Sarah Rice was a beloved “servant” in the Speight household at the time when the notorious exchange of bullets between Stanly and Speight commenced.
John Patterson Green’s mother, Temperance Burden Green, a quadroon whose story further questions the morality of North Carolinians during that era. Now bear with me and try to keep up while I attempt to retell this tale of “unprotected women,” elicit love, the sister/cousin phenomena and race mixing.
Long story short, Temperance’s grandmother and her great-aunt, sisters, were part of the Chestnut (nee Chestnutt) lineage. Both were beautiful and desirable by many of the young suitors of the day. But the ladies grew impatient and weary because no proposals of marriage were forthcoming. So, the sisters sought the advice and found solace from a likeable colored man, their father’s slave. Dude must have been some kind of something else, because he fathered the daughters of both sisters. The two little colored babies were named Obedience or Bede for short and Alice. Bede and Alice later gave birth to a daughter each, which they had by two white men who happened to be brothers.
Anyway, one of the colored daughters of one of the two sisters whose mothers got pregnant by the same slave and who turned around and then themselves got pregnant by two brothers who happened to be white, Obedience or Bede for short, gave birth to Temperance.
Temperance married John Green. Their union produced a son, John Patterson Green.
John Patterson Green lived in the lap of pre-civil war Colored folks well-to-doness during the first five years of his life in New Bern, North Carolina. His father John Green became a highly skilled tailor who was able with his earnings to not only provide a more than comfortable lifestyle for his family, but was able to purchase many of his relatives from the enslavers.
John Stewart Stanley, another free person of color (FPOC) and second cousin of Green became an educator and founded a school for the free persons of color and poor whites in the area. He was John Patterson Green’s first teacher.
At the age of five, John Patterson Green’s father died an early death. Life after his father’s passing was difficult. At a tender age John Patterson Green became the man of the family by helping his mother with tasks that required manly strength and endurance. He took on odd jobs that today might be construed as child labor. There were many nights when the family went to bed hungry. Or they subsisted on meager meals made of little more than corn meal and water.
As a young boy in New Bern, John Patterson Green was constantly warding off cruelty from the cruder members of the white race or free persons of color. Once he witnessed white rage and presumably the birth pangs of mob justice directed at the enslaved black man who had ran afoul of the so-called white law.
In his autobiography, Green recalled how as a young boy working in the Cooper House an enraged white man came in demanding that the colored coopers put holes in his paddle. They refused. Since the white man who called himself the law, knew that their master would back them up and not punish them for refusing to help this cruelty to unfold, commandeered the shop and perforated the paddle himself. He left in an even more
