Association for African American
Historical Research and Preservation

“W.E.B. DuBois, in his essay ‘The Propaganda of History,’ complained, ‘The historian has no right, posing as a scientist, to conceal or distort facts.’ DuBois might have added: Or to make statements purporting to be fact without any supporting data.”
                     –—From “Reexamining the Past: A Different Perspective of Black Strikebreakers in King County’s Coal Mining Industry,” by Ed Diaz (in) More Voices, New Stories: King County, Washington’s First 150 Years

The First African American U.S. Senator and Representatives
Forty-first and Forty-second Congress of the United States

Standing, left to right: Robert C. DeLarge (South Carolina); Jefferson Long (Georgia). Seated, left to right: U.S. Senator Hiram R. Revels (Mississippi); Benjamin S. Turner (Alabama); Josiah T. Walls (Florida); Joseph H. Rainey (South Carolina); Robert B. Elliott (South Carolina).

“The arrival of Senator Hiram Revels of Mississippi and Representative Joseph Rainey of South Carolina on Capitol Hill in 1870 ranks among the great paradoxes in American history; just a decade earlier, these African Americans’ congressional seats were held by southern slave owners. Moreover, the U.S. Capitol, where these newest Members of Congress came to work—the center of legislative government, conceived by its creators as the ‘Temple of Liberty’—had been constructed with the help of enslaved laborers.”
                                                   —Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007

African American U.S. Senators

Hiram R. Revels, Mississippi: elected 1869; served 1870 -1871 (filled unexpired term)

Blanche K. Bruce, Mississippi: elected 1874; served 1875 - 1881 (one term)

Edward R. Brooke, Massachusetts: elected 1966; served 1967 - 1979 (two terms)

Carol Moseley Braun, Illinois: elected 1992; served 1993 - 1999 (one term)

Barack Obama, Illinois: elected 2004; served January 2005 – November 2008
(Elected 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008. President Obama resigned his Senate seat on November 16, 2008, and was sworn in as on Tuesday, January 20, 2009) For the President’s daily activities click here. (You will be leaving the AAAHRP site; use your back button to return here.)

Roland Wallace Burris, Illinois (Appointed to replace President Obama as a United States Senator from Illinois; sworn-in on Thursday, January 15, 2009)