Robert Gleed Sr. (c. 1836 – July 24, 1916), was an American politician, merchant, and civic leader.

[1] He had remained enslaved until the end of the American Civil War, around 1865; and he was arrested as a runaway slave in Columbus, Lowndes County, Mississippi in 1863.

[1][4] In 1871, he testified for Congressional Investigators about the role of Southern newspapers, and the Ku Klux Klan in fomenting violence and resistance to Reconstruction-era efforts in Mississippi in the years after the American Civil War.

[4] He resigned from the state senate in 1873 after violent white mobs lynched seven "recalcitrant blacks".

[5] He met with leading Democratic Party representatives and attempted to appease them before the election.