Hiram Rhodes Revels

Hiram Rhodes Revels was born free on the twenty-seventh of September 1827 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the child of free people of color whose line had stood free since before the Revolution, carrying African, European, and Native ancestry. Denied schooling in the South, he journeyed north to learn, studying at a Quaker seminary in Indiana and at Knox College in Illinois. Ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1845, he carried his ministry across the border states, preaching to the free and the enslaved alike and quietly aiding those who fled bondage.

When the Civil War came, Revels turned his calling toward liberation. He helped raise regiments of Black soldiers in Maryland, established schools for the newly freed in Missouri, and served as a Union army chaplain to a Black regiment in Mississippi. After the war he settled in Natchez, preaching to a large congregation and entering public life with characteristic reluctance, accepting appointment as alderman and then election to the Mississippi state senate.

In January 1870 the Mississippi legislature elected him to the United States Senate. Opponents invoked the Dred Scott ruling to challenge his citizenship, yet the Senate voted forty-eight to eight to seat him, and on the twenty-fifth of February 1870 he took the oath — the first African American ever to serve in the Congress of the United States. In his brief term he rose to defend the ousted Black legislators of Georgia and argued for the dignity and rights of his people.

After leaving the Senate in 1871, Revels became the first president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, the nation's oldest public Black land-grant institution, shaping minds for a decade before his retirement. He died on the sixteenth of January 1901 in Aberdeen, Mississippi. A man of the pulpit and the Senate floor, he opened a door that had been sealed for centuries — and generations have walked through it because he stood first.