May 5, 2023 First Black Senator, Hiram Revels, 1870
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Hiram Rhodes Revels, First Black U.S. Senator
Hiram Rhodes Revels was a Republican U.S. Senator, minister in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, and the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate. Revels was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina on September 27, 1827, to a family that had been free for several generations. His father was an African American and his mother was of Scottish descent. Revels was home schooled by a local African American woman. The family moved to Lincolnton, North Carolina in 1838, and Revels trained and worked as a barber in the shop of his older brother, Elias. After Elias died in 1841, his wife, Mary, deeded the shop to Hiram, who was then fourteen-years old.
Revels attended Beech Grove Quaker Seminary in Indiana and Darke County Seminary in Ohio in 1844. Although his education was incomplete, he was ordained into the African Methodist Episcopal Church, at Allen Chapel, Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1845. Revels traveled extensively, preaching in Illinois, Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee. He spent a brief time in jail in Missouri in 1854 “for preaching to negroes.” From 1855 to 1857, Revels took additional classes at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, graduating with a degree in divinity and theology. He then took a minister position in Baltimore, Maryland and also served as principal at a local black school.
Albert Brown. With this election, Revels became the first African American in the U.S. Senate. His term ended on March 3, 1871 and it would be 100 years until the next African American was elected.
Revels later served as the first president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University). He held that position from 1871 to 1874, and again from 1876 to 1882. In 1873, he briefly served as Mississippi Secretary of State. During the last several years of his life, Revels taught theology at Shaw College (now Rust College), where he also served on the Board of Trustees. He also remained active as a minister in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Revels died at a church meeting in Aberdeen, Mississippi on January 16, 1901. He was 73 at the time of his death.
Dr. Carolyn L. Robertson Payton was the first African American and the first woman to become the director of the U.S. Peace Corps. She was appointed in 1977 by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Carolyn L. Robertson Payton was born on May 13, 1925, in Norfolk, Virginia, to Bertha M. Flanagan, a seamstress, and Leroy S. Robertson, a ship steward. She graduated from Booker T. Washington High school in Norfolk in 1941 and received her B.S. degree in Home Economics from Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1945. Payton remained close to Bennett College, establishing a scholarship fund there in the late 1990s. Payton then attended the University of Wisconsin where her tuition and other expenses were paid by the state of Virginia as part of the state’s policy of sending black graduate students to out-of-state institutions rather than allowing them to received advanced degrees at the state’s universities. Payton received her Master’s in Psychology from Wisconsin in 1948. After graduati...
JOSEPH HAYNE RAINEY (1832-1887) In 1870 Republican Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African American to be elected to the United States House of Representatives and take his seat. Others were elected earlier but were not seated. Rainey was born in Georgetown, South Carolina, on June 21, 1832. His parents had been slaves but his father purchased his family’s freedom and taught him to be a barber. The family moved to Charleston in 1846. Rainey, however, traveled frequently outside the South and married in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1859. In 1861 Joseph Rainey was drafted to work on a Confederate blockade runner during the Civil War. In 1862 he escaped to Bermuda with his wife and worked there as a barber before returning to South Carolina in 1866. Once back in the state, he joined the executive committee of the newly formed South Carolina Republican party. In 1868 he was elected a delegate to the state Constitutional Convention. Two years later in 1870 Raine...
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