Robert Charles O’Hara Benjamin

Editor, journalist, author, lawyer, educator, civil rights activist and, poet Robert Charles O’Hara Benjamin was born on St. Kitts in the British West Indies and educated at Trinity College, University of Oxford. After traveling in the East and West Indies and South America, Benjamin moved to New York City in 1869. As a U.S. citizen, he was an active Republican and worked as a newspaper reporter and teacher before becoming a lawyer in Tennessee. Benjamin practiced law in 12 states and edited several newspapers. He married Lula Marie Robinson and they settled in Lexington, Kentucky, where Benjamin edited the Lexington Standard, an African American newspaper.

During his career Benjamin published numerous volumes of prose, including Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1888) and Southern Outrages: A Statistical Record of Lawless Doings (1894). While much of Benjamin’s prose concerns the political and racial issues with which he was closely involved, his poetry tends to explore themes of nature and love. He published a small collection of poems in 1883 entitled Poetic Gems.

On October 2, 1900, Mike Moynahan, a white Southern Democrat, shot Benjamin in the back in reaction to his work on behalf of African American voters. At the time of his death Benjamin was vice chancellor of the Knights of Pythias, and some years later the organization erected a monument that stands at his grave in African Cemetery No. 2 in Lexington.