Thomas Cardozo

Thomas Whitmarsh Cardozo (December 19, 1838 – April 13, 1881 ) was an American educator, journalist, writer, and public official during the Reconstruction Era in the United States. He adopted the name Civis as a nom de plume and wrote as a correspondent for the New National Era, founded by Frederick Douglass. He was the first African American to hold the position of State Superintendent of Education in Mississippi.

Early life Thomas Whitmarsh Cardozo was born in 1838 in Charleston, South Carolina, as the youngest of five children. His father, Isaac Nunez Cardozo, was part of a well-known Sephardic Jewish family and was a weigher in the U.S. Customs House of Charleston for 24 years, until his death in 1855. Thomas's mother was Lydia Weston, a freed slave of mixed ancestry who was a seamstress. He had two older brothers, Henry Weston Cardozo and Francis Lewis Cardozo, and two older sisters, Lydia Frances Cardozo and Eslander Cardozo.

In August 1874, conservative whites took over the Vicksburg city government and Cardozo was charged with crimes while he was circuit court clerk in 1872. First he was charged with receiving money for falsified witness certificates and then additionally charged with embezzling money paid by land owners for redeeming land taken by the government for unpaid taxes. He appeared before a magistrate on September 7, 1874 and bond was posted. He was indicted in November 1874 and tried beginning May 6, 1875. The jury failed to reach a verdict. He was able to get the retrial moved from Vicksburg to Jackson with a new trial date in July 1876.

After the first trial, the ongoing political attacks by conservative whites against Republican office holders turned into violence. On July 4, 1875 in Vicksburg, a white mob attacked a meeting where Cardozo was to speak, followed by street violence where several blacks were killed or injured. City officials helped Cardozo, the main target of the attacks, escape from the city.

The occupying Army began to withdraw from the South in 1875 in the last years of the Reconstruction era. White Democrats had regained control of the Mississippi state legislature by a program of violence and intimidation against Republican black voters, known as the Mississippi Plan. The legislators brought impeachment charges against Superintendent Cardozo and the Senate impeachment trial began February 11, 1876. The most incriminating charge was that he embezzled money from Tougaloo University. Cardozo was granted permission to resign with the charges against him dismissed, and submitted his resignation on March 22, 1876.

Later years Leaving the politics, an upcoming trial in Jackson in July 1876, and the dangerous situation in Mississippi, Cardozo moved to Newton, Massachusetts. There he worked for the postal service until his death from disease in 1881. He was forty-two. Thomas Cardozo Middle School in Jackson, Mississippi, of the Jackson Public School District, is named for him and opened in September 2010.