Hiram Rhodes Revels was born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1827. He studied at seminaries in Indiana and Ohio and later at Knox College in Illinois. He was ordained a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and preached and taught across the Midwest and the South.
During the Civil War, he helped recruit Black regiments for the Union and served as chaplain to a Black regiment in Mississippi. After the war he settled in Natchez, Mississippi, and in 1869 he was elected to the state senate.
Back then, state legislatures chose U.S. senators. In 1861, Mississippi's senator Jefferson Davis had walked out of the Senate to lead the Confederacy. Nine years later, on January 20, 1870, Mississippi's new legislature voted 85 to 15 to send Hiram Revels to Washington.
Senate Democrats tried to stop him. They argued that a Black man could not have been a citizen for the nine years the Constitution requires, pointing to the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision. On February 25, 1870, the Senate voted 48 to 8 to seat him anyway. He became the first African American to serve in the United States Congress.
In his year in the Senate, he spoke up for Black legislators who had been expelled in Georgia and opposed keeping Washington's schools segregated. After his term he became the first president of Alcorn University in Mississippi.
Born free. Seated in the Senate. And Mississippi made it happen.
