|
 Hiram Revels was a
Protestant clergyman, president of Alcorn University
(Mississippi), and the first black person elected to the U.S.
Senate.
Born a free black in North Carolina, Revels was educated at
Knox College (Illinois) and ordained a minister in the African
Methodist Episcopal (A. M. E.) Church. He worked as a pastor in
various Northern and Border States, and as a principal of a
school for black children in Baltimore, Maryland. During the
Civil War, once Congress authorized the use of blacks in the
Union military, Revels organized two black volunteer regiments
in Maryland and served as a chaplain to another black regiment
in Mississippi.
At the end of the war, Revels ministered to a black
congregation in Natchez, Mississippi, where he was appointed a
city alderman in 1868. The next year, he was elected to the
state senate, where he was one of the first 36 blacks who were
seated in the previously white-only state legislature. A few
months later, in January 1869, the Republican-controlled state
legislature elected Revels to complete the U.S. senatorial term
of Jefferson Davis, who had resigned from the Senate in 1861
when Mississippi seceded from the Union and who soon became
president of the Confederacy. Revels was sworn in as the
nation’s first black senator on February 25, 1870, two days
after Mississippi had been readmitted to the Union under the
provisions of Congressional Reconstruction.
At the term’s conclusion on March 3, 1871, Revels left the
Senate to become the first president of Alcorn University
(Mississippi), the first land-grant college for black students.
In 1874, he was dismissed by the college’s board of directors.
He soon joined the Democratic Party and helped to oust the
Republicans from power in the state. In gratitude, his new
political allies in the Democratic Party reappointed him in 1876
as president of Alcorn, where he served until his retirement in
1881. He then taught theology at Rust College in Holly Springs,
Mississippi, where he also ministered at a local A. M. E.
Church. He died on January 16, 1901, in Aberdeen, Mississippi.
In
addition to Revels, fifteen other black men served in Congress
during the Reconstruction era, including Blanche Bruce, a former
slave who was also elected to the Senate as a Republican from
Mississippi (1875-1881). After Revels and Bruce left office,
however, it was nearly 100 years until the next black,
Republican Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, was elected to the
U.S. Senate (1967-1979). The first black woman and black
Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate was Carol Moseley-Braun
(1993-1999). |
Introduction - John Adler, HarpWeek Publisher...
Black Suffrage, 1787 - 1865
