Blackness

Like the other Black Radical representatives in the 1872 register, Abram Colby's redacted story floated among lengthy glowing accounts of his white legislative assembly peers. Colby's second biography, published in a county history book, described him as an ignorant drunk who insulted a lady and was thrown out of town, never to be seen again. These archival records are all that comprised the entire memory of Colby for generations, save for one other detail preserved by his congressional testimony: the Ku Klux Klan once beat him so severely that a doctor mistakenly declared him dead.