Background
William Hannibal Thomas was born in Pickaway County, Ohio.
William Hannibal Thomas was born in Pickaway County, Ohio.
After the war, he attended Western Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania.
In 1859, he was the first black student admitted to Otterbein University. He served with distinction in the 5th United States. Colored Infantry during the Civil War of 1861-1865, suffering a gunshot wound that led to the amputation of his right arm. He worked briefly at Wilberforce University in Ohio.
In 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Thomas United States. consul to Portuguese Southwest Africa (now Angola).
Later he founded his own journal, The Negro. He is now most remembered for The American Negro (1901), a bombastic work brought out by the Macmillan publishing company.
In this book, he maintained that not skin color but the black population"s traits of character and behavior were the cause of prejudice. "The negro," he wrote, was "an intrinsically inferior type of humanity." He declared that the black individual in America was slowly and steadily deteriorating, and was "immersed in poverty, steeped in ignorance, stifled with immorality, inherently lazy, and a born pilferer." Several black intellectuals such as Booker T. Washington, West.E.B. Du Bois and Charles West. Chesnutt, attacked the author and sought to suppress his book
Washington even used spies to gather damaging information about Thomas.
Death
He died in Columbus, Ohio in 1935.
He then served as a member of the South Carolina Legislature during the Reconstruction period.