Thread by @RealOlaudah

We can do with a little bit of history today. Let's look at African Americans in the United States Congress in a short historical Thread. 🧵

From the first United States Congress in 1789 through the 116th Congress in 2020, 162 African Americans served in Congress. Meanwhile, the total number of all individuals who have served in Congress over that period is 12,348.

Between 1789 and 2020, 152 have served in the House of Representatives, 9 have served in the Senate, and 1 has served in both chambers. Voting members have totaled 156, with 6 serving as delegates. Party membership has been, 131 Democrats, and 31 Republicans.

While 13 members founded the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971 during the 92nd Congress, in the 116th Congress (2019-2020), 56 served, with 54 Democrats and 2 Republicans (total seats are 535, plus 6 delegates).

By the time of the first edition of the House sponsored book, Black Americans in Congress, in the bicentennial year of 1976, 45 African Americans had served in Congress throughout history; that rose to 66 by the 2nd edition in 1990, and there were further sustained increases in..

both the 2008 and 2018 editions. The first African American to serve was Senator Hiram Revels in 1870. The first to chair a congressional committee was Representative William L. Dawson in 1949.

The first woman was Representative Shirley Chisholm in 1968, and the first to become Dean of the House was John Conyers in 2015. One member, then Senator Barack Obama, went from the Senate to President of the United States in 2009.

The first African Americans to serve in the Congress were Republicans elected during the Reconstruction Era. After the 13th and 14th Amendments granted freedom and citizenship to enslaved people, freedmen gained political representation in the Southern US for the first time.

In response to the growing numbers of Black statesmen and politicians, White Democrats turned to violence and intimidation to regain their political power.
By the presidential election of 1876, only three state legislatures were not controlled by whites.

The Compromise of 1877 completed the period of Redemption by white Southerners, with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. State legislatures began to pass Jim Crow laws to establish racial segregation & restrict labor rights, movement, and organizing by black people.

They passed some laws to restrict voter registration, aimed at suppressing the black vote. From 1890 to 1908, state legislatures in the South essentially disfranchised most black people and many poor white people from voting by passing new constitutions or amendments or other...

laws related to more restrictive electoral and voter registration and electoral rules. As a result of the Civil Rights Movement, the U.S. Congress passed laws in the mid-1960s to end segregation and enforce constitutional civil rights and voting rights.

As Republicans accommodated the end of Reconstruction becoming more ambiguous on civil rights and with the rise of the Republican lily-white movement, African Americans began shifting away from the Republican Party.

During two waves of massive migration within the United States in the first half of the 20th century, more than six million African Americans moved from the South to Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western industrial cities, with five million migrating from 1940 to 1970.

Some were elected to federal political office from these new locations, and most were elected as Democrats. During the Great Depression, many black voters switched allegiances from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party, in support of the New Deal economic, social...

network, and work policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. This trend continued through the 1960s civil rights legislation, when voting rights returned to the South, to present.

History of black representation
Reconstruction & Redemption 

The right of black people to vote & to serve in the United States Congress was established after the Civil War by amendments to the Constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment (ratified December 6, 1865), abolished slavery.

The Fourteenth Amendment (ratified July 9, 1868) made all people born or naturalized in the United States citizens. The Fifteenth Amendment (ratified February 3, 1870) forbade the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of...

servitude, and gave Congress the power to enforce the law by appropriate legislation.
In 1866, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the four Reconstruction Acts, which dissolved all governments in the former Confederate states with the exception of Tennessee.

It divided the South into five military districts, where the military through the Freedmen's Bureau helped protect the rights and safety of newly freed black people.

The act required that the former Confederate states ratify their constitutions conferring citizenship rights on black people or forfeit their representation in Congress.

As a result of these measures, black people acquired the right to vote across the Southern states. In several states (notably Mississippi and South Carolina), black people were the majority of the population.

By forming coalitions with pro-Union white people, Republicans took control of the state legislatures. At the time, state legislatures elected the members of the US Senate.

During Reconstruction, only the state legislature of Mississippi elected any black senators. On February 25, 1870, Hiram Rhodes Revels was seated as the first black member of the Senate, while Blanche Bruce, also of Mississippi, seated in 1875, was the second.

Revels was the first black member of the Congress overall.
Black people were a majority of the population in many congressional districts across the South. In 1870, Joseph Rainey of South Carolina was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first directly...

elected black member of Congress to be seated. Black people were elected to national office also from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

All of these Reconstruction era black senators and representatives were members of the Republican Party. The Republicans represented the party of Abraham Lincoln and of emancipation. The Democrats represented the party of planters, slavery and secession.

From 1868, Southern elections were accompanied by increasing violence, especially in Louisiana, Mississippi and the Carolinas, in an effort by Democrats to suppress black voting and regain power.

In the mid-1870s, paramilitary groups such as the White League and Red Shirts worked openly to turn Republicans out of office and intimidate black people from voting. This followed the earlier years of secret vigilante action by the Ku Klux Klan against freedmen and allied...

white people.
After the disputed Presidential election of 1876 between Democratic Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York, and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio, a national agreement between Democratic and Republican factions was negotiated, resulting in the...

Compromise of 1877. Under the compromise, Dems conceded the election to Hayes and promised to acknowledge the political rights of black people; GOP agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South and promised to appropriate a portion of federal monies toward Southern projects.

Disenfranchisement Edit

With the Southern states "redeemed", Democrats gradually regained control of Southern legislatures. They proceeded to restrict the rights of the majority of black people and many poor white people to vote by imposing new requirements for poll taxes,...

subjective literacy tests, more strict residency requirements and other elements difficult for laborers to satisfy.
By the 1880s, legislators increased restrictions on black voters through voter registration and election rules.

In 1888 John Mercer Langston, president of Virginia State University at Petersburg, was elected to the U.S. Congress as the first African American from Virginia. He would also be the last for nearly a century, as the state passed a disenfranchising constitution at the turn of...

the century that excluded black people from politics for decades.
Starting with the Florida Constitution of 1885, white Democrats passed new constitutions in ten Southern states with provisions that restricted voter registration and forced hundreds of thousands of people from...

registration rolls. These changes effectively prevented most black people and many poor white people from voting.

Many white people who were also illiterate were exempted from such requirements as literacy tests by such strategies as the grandfather clause, basing eligibility on an ancestor's voting status as of 1866, for instance.

Southern state and local legislatures also passed Jim Crow laws that segregated transportation, public facilities, and daily life. Finally, racial violence in the form of lynchings and race riots increased in frequency, reaching a peak in the last decade of the 19th century.

The last black congressman elected from the South in the 19th century was George Henry White of North Carolina, elected in 1896 and re-elected in 1898. His term expired in 1901, the same year that William McKinley, who was the last president to have fought in the Civil War, died.

No black people served in Congress for the next 28 years, and none represented any Southern state for the next 72 years.

© Wikipedia and some editions.

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