by Dan
Perkins
Source: U.S. Senate web site
To
date, only five African Americans have
ever served as United States Senators.
In 1870, Hiram Revels of
Mississippi became the first African
American senator. Revels was born
in North Carolina in 1827, and attended
Know College in Illinois. He later
served as a minister in the African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore,
Maryland. During the Civil War,
Revels raised two black regiments and
fought at the battle of Vicksburg in
Mississippi. The Mississippi state
legislature sent him to the U.S. Senate
following the Civil War, during the
Reconstruction era. In the Senate,
Revels was an outspoken opponent of
racial segregation.
In 1875,
Mississippi elected its second African
American senator, Blanche K. Bruce.
He was born into slavery in 1841, and
spent his childhood years in Virginia
where he received his earliest education
from a tutor hired to teach his master's
son. At the outset of the Civil
War, Bruce escaped to the North, where
he began a career in education and
politics. Elected to the Senate in
1874 by the Mississippi state
legislature, Bruce served from 1875 to
1881.
Following
the end of Bruce's term, the mood of the
nation increasingly hostile towards
African Americans, and it would take
almost a century before Edward Brooke
of Massachusetts was elected to the
senate in 1967.
In 1993,
Carol Moseley Braun broke new
ground by becoming the first African
American senator to represent the state
of Illinois, and the first African
American female to serve as U.S.
senator. During her Senate career,
Moseley Braun was an advocate for
education and gun control. Shortly
after leaving the Senate in January
1999, she became the U.S. Ambassador to
New Zealand, a position she held until
2001. In 2004, Moseley Braun
sought the Democratic nomination for
president.
In 2004,
Illinois elected its second African
American senator, Barack Obama.
He was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961,
and spent his childhood in Hawaii and
Indonesia. He graduated from
Columbia University in 1983 and moved to
Chicago in 1985 to work for a
church-based group seeking to improve
conditions for the poor. In 1991,
Obama graduated from Harvard Law School
where he was the first African American
editor of the Harvard Law Review.
He served in the Illinois state senate
from 1997 to 2004. He began
serving in the U.S. Senate on January 3,
2005.
THE END
