Now that congressional districts have been redrawn to give minorities better representation, some historians think it is a good time to remember Josiah T. Walls.

Walls was Florida’s first and only black U.S. representative and he was elected more than 120 years ago during Reconstruction.

Melanie Barr, chairman of the Alachua County Historical Commission, has made a detailed study of his life.

Her hope is that more people will learn about his struggle to gain power at a time Walls when the nation was still reeling from the ravages of slavery.

Her regret is that few people have heard of him.

“He died the way he started: poor and unknown,” said Barr, who pushed to have a historic marker placed in Gainesville’s central business district in Walls’ honor.

Waslls, a Virginia native, served in both the Confederate and Union armies during the Civil War. After the war, he moved to Alachua County and worked as a lumberman and a teacher.

“His political career started when Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act in March 1867, allowing blacks to vote and thus gain political power,” Barr said.

Well-educated, handsome and articulate, Walls, of Gainesville, was able to charm and persuade.

“He seemed like a Harvard lawyer,” Barr said. “His speeches were magnificent.”

His political career also benefited from timing; during Reconstruction, many Southern whites were disenfranchised. That gave the black vote considerable power, Barr said.

Walls served a term in the state House and two terms in the state Senate before running for Congress. That was where he found the biggest roadblocks waiting for him.

Two of the three times he ran for Congress, he won the elections only to be ousted after the results were contested.

The first time, in 1870, he beat Silas Niblack, a conservative white from Lake City. Out of 25,000 votes cast, Walls won by 620 votes.

“This was a messy race,” Barr said.

After charges of fraud and a miscount, Niblack was declared the winner, after Walls had already served all but two months of his term.

Meanwhile, Walls had been campaigning and won re-election to a full term in the 43rd Congress in 1872.

In 1874, Walls beat J.J. Finley, a Confederate general from Jacksonville, by 371 votes. But, again, Finley contested the results, and Walls was ousted after serving a year.

Still, Walls made important contributions while in Congress. He introduced several bills to improve Florida’s fledgling railroads and harbors, as well as for federal aid to education.

He also introduced a bill to grant a million acres to what is now Florida A&M; University in Tallahassee, and 90,000 acres were allotted.

With his rise in politics, Walls became owner of an 1,175-acre plantation, became a commercial orange grower and purchased a newspaper. A Republican, he stayed in politics for a while, serving a stint on the Alachua County Commission and as Gainesville mayor.

Ultimately, he returned to farming, and while working the fields refused to talk about his political past with farmhands.

In 1885, his good fortunes started coming to an end. His wife died that year. In 1894, a freeze wiped out his orange crop. Shortly after the turn of the century, his only child, a daughter named Nettie, killed a little girl and was committed to a state mental institution.

Having lost his home, family and wealth, Walls moved to Tallahassee, where he spent the rest of his days as farm director at Florida A&M.;

He died a pauper in 1905 with no will and no death certificate. He was buried in a blacks-only cemetery in Tallahassee.

In 1941, Gainesville officials would name an elementary school after J.J. Finley, the man Walls initially beat for a congressional seat.

Walls would be all but forgotten.