History on the Hill: Breaking the Barrier
On Feb. 25, 1870, Hiram Rhoades Revels (1827–1901) of Mississippi was sworn into office as the nation's first black U.S. senator and—in one of history's great ironies—was admitted to the very seat occupied before the war by Jefferson Davis, father of the Confederacy.
Yet this triumphant scene was preceded by three days of intense debate during which "abuse," as a reporter from the New York Times delicately put it, was "poured upon [Revels] and his race," when Confederate-leaning, anti-Reconstruction Democrats sought to bar his admission. (Revels, like most blacks and progressive whites of that era, belonged to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln.)
Revels was born and raised a free black in North Carolina and attended seminary in Ohio and Illinois to become a minister and educator. He organized black Union regiments in Maryland and Missouri during the Civil War, and afterward, he moved to Natchez, Miss., where he soon stood out as a community leader.
Because at that time the majority of Mississippi's population was black, explains Lawrence Otis Graham, author of The Senator and the Socialite, a biography of the second black senator, Blanche Bruce, the Republican Party needed the support of black voters to stay in power. Thus, when Revels was tapped by the state Legislature to be a U.S. senator (in the 19th century, senators were elected by state legislatures, not by popular vote), he represented a practical political coalition.
He was a member of the Senate for just one year, serving out the unexpired time on one of the seats Mississippi vacated at the time of secession. But he did protest segregation in the Washington, D.C., schools (unsuccessfully—the future black Sen. Edward Brooke would later attend those same segregated schools). And he succeeded in gaining work for black mechanics in the U.S. Navy Yard. Still, his support for conciliation and amnesty for ex-Confederates has led critics to describe him as an accommodationist. But within the context of those turbulent times, Revels was pragmatic, says Eric Foner, a Columbia University history professor and author of Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation & Reconstruction. "If you're going to get elected to the Senate, you are going to have to get white support; you are going to have to be accommodationist."
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