George Washington Woodbey (October 5, 1854 – August 27, 1937) was an influential African-American minister, author and Socialist. He wrote several influential papers about Socialism and African Americans, ministered in churches in the Midwestern United States and California, and served as the sole Black delegate to the Socialist Party of America conventions in 1904 and 1908. Biography Early years Woodbey was born into slavery in Johnson County, Tennessee, to Charles and Rachel Woodbey. Little is known about his childhood, though it is reported that he learned to read at a young age. Following the conclusion of the Civil War, Woodbey made his way to Emporia, Kansas and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1874. He ministered in churches in Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri. Woodbey became active in the Republican Party and by the 1880s became interested in social reform. In Omaha he joined the Prohibition Party and ran on their ticket for Lieutenant Governor of Nebraska in 1890. He was Nebraska's Prohibition Party's candidate for Congress in 1894. In the 1900 Presidential campaigns, Woodbey supported the Democratic and Populist candidate William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska. During this period Woodbey became familiar with the ideas of Eugene Debs, a labor organizer and future five-time Socialist candidate for president. The Democratic Party invited Woodbey to deliver speeches, but then cut him off because he was too strongly socialist. Socialist Woodbey became a member of the Socialist Party. He never took the Socialist Party to task on the question of race, even after his own nomination for vice presidential candidate was met with only one vote. Woodbey believed the Socialist Party could help solve racial problems in the United States because of its emphasis on economic changes to the system. Woodbey also saw the struggle for socialism as an extension of the struggle against slavery: as the Civil War had ended chattel slavery, so would the replacement of capitalism with socialism abolish wage slavery. Woodbey directly compared the means of repression used to discipline slaves and the working class, stating: "In the days of chattel slavery the masters had a patrol force to keep the negroes in their place and protect the interests of the masters. Today the capitalists use the police for the same purpose". Woodbey also noted the emergence of class stratification among the black community, and expressed skepticism regarding relying on upper-class black leadership in the fight against racism, noting