George Edwin Taylor, born August 4, 1857, is the first African American presidential candidate. Running for office in 1904, George was a neither a Republican or a Democrat but a member of his own party, "The National Negro Liberty Party." At the time George ran he had absolutely no chance of wining and he knew this saying "Yes, I know most white folks take me as a joke." George didn't have the best childhood. His father a slave and his mother passing away when he was just 5, he knew he had to grow up fast. He gained early experiences as a journalist and a political activist. By 1891 Taylor left Wisconsin for Iowa where he published a weekly newspaper, the Negro Solicitor. No known copies of George's Negro Solicitor survived, except for scattered articles reprinted in other newspapers or found in scrapbooks.

While Taylor’s campaign attracted little attention, the Party’s platform had a national agenda: universal suffrage regardless of race and federal protection of the rights of all citizens among other things. George's presidential race was unrealistic like said before. In an interview published in The Sun, he says "while I know whites think my candidacy is a joke, i believe that an independent political party that could mobilize the African American vote is the only way that blacks can exercise political influence." George's campaign in 1904 was unsuccessful. No newspaper supported the party, state laws kept the party from listing candidates officially on election ballots and George's name failed to be added to any state ballot. The votes he received were not recorded in state records. It would be a little over a century until we got our first African American President, Barak Obama in 2008.