Hiram Rhodes Revels

Hiram Rhodes Revels was born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on the twenty-seventh of September 1827, the son of free Black parents of mixed African, European, and Lumbee ancestry. He took his education at Quaker seminaries in Indiana and Ohio and at Knox College in Illinois. He was ordained an African Methodist Episcopal minister in 1845, served congregations across the Midwest, and raised regiments of Black troops for the Union Army during the Civil War.

He moved to Mississippi in 1866 and entered Reconstruction politics. The Mississippi state legislature elected him on the twentieth of January 1870 to fill the United States Senate seat that Jefferson Davis had vacated when Mississippi seceded in 1861. The seat was the same one Davis had occupied. Revels became the first African American to serve in the United States Senate. He served a partial term — from the twenty-fifth of February 1870 to the third of March 1871 — and used his thirteen-month tenure to argue successfully for the desegregation of the District of Columbia public schools and for the readmission of Black officers to the U.S. Army.

He returned to Mississippi in 1871 and served as president of Alcorn University (the historically Black land-grant institution) and as a presiding elder in the AME Church. He retired from active ministry in 1894.

He died in Aberdeen, Mississippi, on the sixteenth of January 1901, age seventy-three.

He is honored here as the first African American to serve in the United States Senate.