John Adams Hyman

John Adams Hyman was born into slavery on the twenty-third of July, 1840, near Warrenton in Warren County, North Carolina. His parents were enslaved, and as a boy he hungered for the forbidden gift of literacy. When it was discovered that a Northern jeweler had begun teaching him to read, Hyman was sold away to a slaveholder in Alabama as punishment, carried far from the land of his birth for the crime of seeking knowledge.

Freedom found him in 1865, and Hyman returned to Warren County a free man, resolved to build the citizenship that bondage had denied. He rose swiftly through the councils of Reconstruction, serving as a delegate to the state equal rights and Freedmen's conventions, to the Republican state convention, and to the North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868. That same year he was elected to the North Carolina State Senate, where he represented Warren County's district for three terms, from 1868 to 1874.

In 1874 Hyman was elected as a Republican to the Forty-fourth United States Congress from North Carolina's Second District. When he took his seat on the fourth of March, 1875, he became the first African American to represent North Carolina in the House of Representatives, and the only Republican the state sent to that Congress. He served a single term, until the third of March, 1877.

He died in Washington, D.C., on the fourteenth of September, 1891, and was laid to rest in that city. From a spelling book taken by force to the halls of the Republic, John Adams Hyman turned stolen years into a seat of honor, and his name endures as North Carolina's first Black voice in Congress.