Mike Espy and Hiram Revels: Who was the first black senator in Mississippi?

The last high-profile mid-term race, Tuesday's tight showdown between Mississippi contenders Mike Espy and Cindy Hyde-Smith, could give one of the most memorable results of the season: a black senator from a state that has not elected an African-American candidate a state-wide office for more than a century.

Yet, if the election of Espy, a former congressman who was secretary of agriculture under Bill Clinton's government, would be historic, it would not be unprecedented. The same Mississippi seat has already been occupied by the first African-American to serve in the US Senate.

[Cindy Hyde-Smith has embraced Confederate history more than once in her political career]

Hiram Rhodes Revels, former barber and former chaplain of the Union Army, went to Washington in 1870, at the beginning of a remarkable (though short-lived) period of what historians call "biracial democracy" in the Great South of the time of reconstruction.

"It was a turning point in American history, even if it was overthrown soon," said Eric Foner, professor of history emeritus at Columbia University.

The reaction of black men to power should not be long in arriving. However, for a brief period immediately after the American Civil War, newly enfranchised African-Americans would participate widely and freely in electoral politics, putting their candidates to power in courthouses on Capitol Hill. At its peak, at least 15 African-Americans sat in Congress, some of whom were former slaves.

Revels was the first. Native of North Carolina, he was of African and European origin. After briefly working as a barber, he attended Quaker Schools and Knox College in Illinois. He became a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and was a teacher and preacher in churches in the South and Midwest. According to his Congressional biography, he was working in St. Louis, despite the fact that Missouri prohibited blacks from settling freely in the state, fearing that their presence might inspire a slave uprising.

Revels has shown a strategic restraint that would serve him later in politics.

"I refrained from doing anything that might encourage slaves to flee their masters," he writes in his autobiography. "Given that my goal was to preach the gospel to them and to improve their moral and spiritual condition, even the slaveholders were tolerant of me."

During the war, Revels helped recruit Black troops from Maryland and served as their chaplain. He organized schools for newly emancipated slaves.

"This is the kind of context from which black leaders come," said Foner. "You had to have some sort of leadership experience."

After the war, Revels led churches in Mississippi and his efforts to create educational opportunities for former slaves attracted the attention of Republican Party officials eager to recruit black candidates for an electorate that suddenly looked like an equal number of voters. African Americans and Whites. Revels was elected in 1868 to the Aldermen Board of Directors in Natchez, Missouri. The following year, he won a seat in the Mississippi Senate, one of more than 30 black members of a 140-member legislature.

At the time, US senators were not elected by the people, but by the state legislatures (the 17th Amendment would change that about 30 years later). The Mississippi legislature, elected by both races, was sworn in just in time to fulfill its essential task of occupying the seats of the two Mississippi senators who had left office early in the war, including the Confederate President. Jefferson Davis.

An agreement was reached to choose a black senator and a white senator. In 1870, Revels was elected with one year of mandate. He should not be only the first African-American member of the US Senate, but the first to sit in either House of Congress.

[He was the first black man elected to Congress. But white lawmakers refused to seat him.]

"Today, we are making the declaration a reality," said Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts about the election of Revels, describing this moment of accomplishment as the founding principle of the day. America according to which "all men are created equal".

Despite these praises, the Democratic senators have fiercely resisted. Because the 14th Amendment had made blacks only citizens in 1868, Revels did not meet the nine-year requirement imposed by the Constitution on senators in matters of citizenship, they argued.

Be that as it may, on February 25, 1870, the Senate elected 48 to 8. There were applause in the galleries and some claimed that it was Davis' own delegation that had delivered the first black senator.

The Confederate leader "went to set up a government whose cornerstone should be the oppression and perpetual slavery of a race because their skin was of a different color from his," thundered Senator Nevada, thunder. "Sir, what a magnificent show of retributive justice is being observed here!"

A drawing by cartoonist Thomas Nast depicts Jefferson Davis dismayed in the election of a black American senator from Mississippi. The former Confederate president quotes Shakespeare's "Othello": "That's why I suspect that the vigorous Moor has seized my seat: this thought is like a poisoned mineral that gnaws my inside. . "

Revels' Senate career was brief and moderate. He advocated both "Negro representation" and the Confederate universal amnesty. A year later, not looking for a full term, he returned to Mississippi and became president of Alcorn State University, a historically black land grant institution.

The Mississippi would elect another African-American Reconstruction Senator, Blanche Bruce, who would have served a full term in 1875. Yet this marked the end of Black's full participation in Mississippi politics.

The opposition of the whites to the black representation has developed. A member of the South American African-American Congress was assassinated in 1868 and the Ku Klux Klan was born.

"It was a period of terrorism," said Foner. "You risked your life to become a black political leader."

The elections of 1875 were marked by violence and repression, an affirmation of white political domination fueled by the mob in the era of the post-civil war Redemption.

"The reconstruction was over," said Foner.

No African-American has been elected by all Mississippi voters since.

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