By Bob Ray Sanders
bobray@star-telegram.com
At a time when there is much divisive discussion over voting rights in this country, a former Tarrant County commissioner has in his possession a ballot box that he thinks connects him with the first black man in the country to vote after ratification of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution.
Last week, Bob Hampton, who is also a former mayor of Hurst, showed me the rare box that Thomas Mundy Peterson may have used when he voted in a Perth Amboy, N.J., city charter election more than 140 years ago.
Peterson, born in Metuchen, N.J., to a mother born a slave and a father born free, was a school custodian and handyman when he cast his ballot March 31, 1870, to revise the charter. Ironically, that was the same date that President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act ending Congressional Reconstruction and readmitting Texas to the Union.
The 15th Amendment, ratified Feb. 3, 1870, declared: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
When asked how he found the ballot box, a 12-inch-square cast-iron open frame holding a large glass cylinder, Hampton said, "I didn't find it; it found me."
During the Korean War, Hampton, now 80, served in an Army counterintelligence unit in Europe with a man from New Jersey, Kenneth H. Hacker.
His buddy's mother was an antique dealer in Morristown, N.J., not far from where Peterson was born and the place where he cast that first vote.
Hacker, who is now dead, told Hampton that his mom had bought the box from the family of Thomas Edison, a customer of Hacker's stepfather, an Oldsmobile dealer.
Hampton said Hacker later moved to Spring in Harris County, and after his mother died, all of her belongings where shipped to him in Texas. He kept things from the antique shop in storage until about 20 years ago when Hampton went down to help him move the items to his home garage.
For his help and his friendship, Hacker gave the voting box to Hampton, who has told few people about it until now.
When he opened the iron lid of the box, Hampton said, he found a laminated newspaper clipping from a local New Jersey paper that had the date "March 17, 1936" written on it.
The clipping depicted an illustration of a black man using the unique voting box, one with a small hole in the lid through which the voter dropped colored, hand-carved stone marbles to indicate his choice. The caption reads, in part: "First negro voter in United States was Thomas Peterson of Perth Amboy. ... He received a special medal commemorating the event."
Attached to a gold bar, that commemorative medallion, bearing the likeness of a clean-shaven Abraham Lincoln, was proudly worn by Peterson for years. It is now the property of Xavier University in New Orleans.
Peterson, a Republican, went on to serve on the charter revision committee, became the town's first elected black when he won a seat on the Middlesex County Commission and was the city's first "colored" person to serve on a jury. The school where he served as janitor was later named for him.
Hampton recently wrote to the mayor of Perth Amboy, a town of about 50,000 residents, and told her of the ballot box. When he spoke to her briefly by phone, he said she really didn't know anything about it. The town has commissioned a duplicate of the medallion honoring Peterson's first vote, he said.
Admiring the box, Hampton said, "It's a great historical artifact."
Indeed it is, whether or not it was the actual one used by Peterson.
Hampton said he hasn't cleaned the glass cylinder because "it just might have Thomas Edison's fingerprints on it."
In Wednesday's column I'll write more about voting rights and how Texas has tried to circumvent them.
Bob Ray Sanders' column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.817-390-7775
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