Born Enslaved but grew to be a Gold Rush Millionaire, Horse Racing Empresario, and Civil Rights Leader
Robert Harlan grew up alongside John Marshall Harlan and went on to an extraordinary career. An early Black leaders, to all appearances, Robert was John Marshall Harlan’s brother. His stunning success as a horse-racing impresario, gold rush entrepreneur, financier of Black-owned businesses, world traveler, state representative, and leading Black citizen in Ohio made an obvious impression on the Supreme Court justice. Robert was also the justice’s secret defender, helping him wiggle out of a politically embarrassing situation that threatened to derail his career before he joined the court, and then using his own contacts to push for John’s appointment.
The boldness of Robert’s exploits—from crossing the ocean to bring Kentucky-style horse racing to the jockey clubs of England, to making an unannounced visit to President Ulysses Grant at his seaside retreat, to debating French politics with the erudite Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner (an exchange that one newspaper report suggested was conducted in French)—made a mockery of the notions of racial inferiority that so often laced the opinions of the Supreme Court majority. Even in the face of stiff resistance by less affluent Black people, who saw the shifting winds of their race’s fortunes far earlier than he did, Robert urged them to keep their faith in American institutions. He fought for legislation to allow Black people access to inns and restaurants and public transportation, while founding schools and leading Ohio’s first Black state militia unit, arguing that men who are newly free ought to be first in line to defend American freedoms.
Celebrating the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1870, which granted Black people the right to vote, Robert spoke before an audience of Black and white people at a Cincinnati jubilee and offered his prophecy, his creed: “Knowledge is power; and those who know the most, and not those who have the most, will govern this country. Let us combine and associate and organize for this end. In the pulpit, in the press, in the street, everywhere let our theme be education, education; until there cannot be found anywhere a child of us that is not at the school. With this endeavor carried out, who can measure the progress that may be made in a single generation of freedom by a poor, despised, and enslaved race? Then, indeed, would vanish prejudice; then would the noble martyrs of our cause not have died in vain, and human slavery would evermore be an impossibility.