He and other African Americans were prohibited from taking office by their colleagues in the Georgia Assembly.
Federal intervention in 1870 overruled the discriminatory exclusion, and Joiner would win re-election to a second term in office.
Participants were shot at and attacked at the Republican campaign rally in Camilla, including by the sheriff.
Joiner submitted his testimony on the event to the Freedmen Bureau's O.H.
It was commemorated 100 years after it happened as the Camilla massacre.