Revels Takes Seat: First Black Senator Sworn In

Hiram Rhodes Revels took his seat as a Republican senator from Mississippi on February 25, 1870, becoming the first African American to serve in the US Congress. The irony was deliberately symbolic: he occupied the seat previously held by Jefferson Davis, the former Confederate president. Revels was a free-born man from North Carolina, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and a college-educated Union Army chaplain. His seating was contested for three days by Democrats who argued that Black men had not been citizens long enough to meet the Constitution's nine-year citizenship requirement for senators. The debate was resolved by the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified just two years earlier, which established birthright citizenship. Revels served only one year, finishing the unexpired term, and then became president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College. His brief Senate career proved that Reconstruction could deliver genuine Black political power, even if that power was soon crushed by white supremacist violence.