Ballot Proposal to allow Negro suffrage in Michigan fails for the fourth time (1868)

In 1868, the same year the state rejected the 15th Amendment giving blacks the right to vote, Dawson Pompey became the first African American to hold elective office in Michigan when Covert residents chose him to oversee local road projects.

https://libguides.lib.msu.edu/c.php?g=95622&p=624423

Source : Zlati Meyer, "Rural west Michigan Covert Township Integrated Quietly in the 1860s", Detroit Free Press, September 5, 2011. For more information about Covert, the town that never knew segregation, see A stronger kinship : one town's extraordinary story of hope and faith/ Anna-Lisa Cox.