Revels, Hiram Rhodes

Impact on the world

Took the Senate oath of office on February 25, 1870, becoming the first African American to serve in either house of the U.S. Congress, in a moment described by one contemporary as making him 'the Fifteenth Amendment in flesh and blood'; his seating followed two days of Senate debate over whether a Black man could legally meet the chamber's citizenship requirements, debate rooted in the Dred Scott decision that the recently ratified 14th and 15th Amendments had just overturned.

Life & background

Born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Revels traveled north for an education denied him in the South, studying at seminaries in Indiana and Ohio before becoming an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister in 1845. During the Civil War he helped organize two regiments of Black soldiers and served as a Union Army chaplain in Mississippi, then settled in Natchez after the war, where he became a respected community leader, was elected alderman in 1868, and won a seat in the Mississippi State Senate in 1869. An opening prayer he delivered to the Mississippi legislature in January 1870 so impressed colleagues that it directly led to his nomination for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Confederate sympathizers in 1861; after two days of Senate floor debate over his eligibility rooted in the Dred Scott decision, he was seated by a 48-8 party-line vote, with the packed Senate gallery rising to watch him sworn in. During his brief term he advocated for school and railroad desegregation while also supporting amnesty for former Confederates, a moderate stance that drew criticism from some who felt he did too little to advance Black political power. He left the Senate in 1871 to become the first president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, now Alcorn State University, the first land-grant historically Black college in the United States.

Sources

1. U.S. Senate Historical Office; Encyclopædia Britannica; National Geographic; National Constitution Center