The First Black Man Elected to Congress Was Nearly Denied His Seat

Hiram Rhodes Revels arrived on Capitol Hill to take his seat as the first Black member of the U.S. Congress in 1870. But first, the Mississippi Republican faced several Democrats determined to block him.

The Constitution requires senators to hold citizenship for at least nine years, and they argued Revels had only recently become a citizen under the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. Before that, the Supreme Court had ruled in its 1857 Dred Scott decision that Black people could not be U.S. citizens.

Revels' fellow Republicans argued he was born a free man in the United States and had voted in Ohio years earlier—evidence, they said, that he had long been recognized as a citizen. They maintained that the Dred Scott decision was unjust and that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment were intended to correct its consequences. Just because the law had only recently recognized Black men’s citizenship didn’t mean Revels was a “new” citizen.

Revels was chosen by Mississippi’s newly formed state legislature rather than elected through a statewide popular vote. The legislature convened in January 1870 as Mississippi sought readmission to Congress, and it had to fill two Senate vacancies that had remained open since the state’s secession in 1861. Black legislators, who made up roughly one-quarter of the body, insisted that one of the seats go to a Black Republican. Revels had served as a minister, Union Army chaplain and educator before settling in Natchez, where he was elected a city alderman in 1868 and a state senator the following year.

After consulting among themselves, the Black legislators backed Revels, believing his election would challenge racial discrimination and demonstrate Black political leadership. His colleagues had also been impressed by an impassioned prayer he delivered when the legislative session opened. They selected him to serve the shorter of the two Senate terms, which was due to expire in March 1871. Mississippi was readmitted to congressional representation on February 23, 1870, and two days later, the Senate voted 48 to 8 to seat Revels.

“Mr. Revels, the colored Senator from Mississippi, was sworn in and admitted to his seat this afternoon,” reported The New York Times on February 25, 1870. “Mr. Revels showed no embarrassment whatever, and his demeanor was as dignified as could be expected under the circumstances. The abuse which had been poured upon him and on his race during the last two days might well have shaken the nerves of any one.”

Over the next decade, 15 more Black men took their seats in the House and Senate, including formerly enslaved men such as South Carolina Congressman Robert Smalls.

“It really does reflect what a revolutionary period Reconstruction was,” says Gregory Downs, a history professor at the University of California, Davis. In 1867, Congress directed the Army to oversee voter registration for Black men in the South.

“In a series of a few months, you had people…in South Carolina and other places who had been slaves as recently as two or three years before now participating, now voting and even being elected to serve to remake the Constitution.”

The large population of formerly enslaved people meant that there were many more Black voters in the South than in the North (in fact, some Northern states didn’t enfranchise Black men until after the Southern states). Black men elected Black representatives and white Republicans to local and state offices, paving the way for Black representation in Congress.

But the people who had objected to Revels joining the Senate were still angry, and a violent backlash soon followed. In the 1870s, white supremacist organizations like the White League and the Red Shirts began terrorizing and intimidating Black men to prevent them from voting or participating in government.

Because of these tactics, “the height of statewide Black power crests in the middle of the 1870s,” Downs says. “But what does remain in place from the 1880s into the mid-1890s is an enormous amount of Black local political power centered in the regions where Black people are a sizable majority.”

That political power too came under attack as Jim Crow laws, poll taxes and other discriminatory measures spread throughout the South. “The 1890s and early 1900s is where you get the laws that aim to permanently exclude virtually all Black voters from participating,” Downs says. “The final Black congressman from the south is George White who gives his farewell address, the phoenix speech, in 1901.”

After White, there were no more Black members of Congress from the original 11 Confederate states until 1973, when Andrew Young Jr. of Georgia and Barbara Jordan of Texas (both Democrats) took their seats. Jordan’s election was particularly significant, coming just four years after New York’s Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to Congress in 1968—more than a century after the abolition of slavery.