Joseph Rainey

Joseph Hayne Rainey was born on the twenty-first of June 1832 at Georgetown, South Carolina, into slavery. His father, Edward L. Rainey, was an enslaved barber whom his master permitted to hire out his own labor and retain a share of his earnings; his mother was Grace, remembered as being of African and French descent. Through steady, disciplined saving, Edward purchased freedom for himself and his family in the early 1840s, delivering his sons from bondage while still boys.

Barred by South Carolina law from schooling, Joseph never received a formal education. He learned his father's trade instead, and by the 1850s worked as a barber at the fashionable Mills House hotel in Charleston. When the Civil War came, Confederate authorities conscripted him for labor on the harbor fortifications; he and his wife Susan escaped to Bermuda, where he continued his craft until the war's end.

Returning to South Carolina during Reconstruction, Rainey entered public life with conviction. He served in the state constitutional convention and the state senate before being elected to fill a vacant congressional seat. On the twelfth of December 1870 he was seated in the United States House of Representatives — the first African American ever to serve in that chamber.

Reelected four times despite the violence and intimidation of ex-Confederates, he became the longest-serving Black member of Congress of the Reconstruction era, and on occasion presided over the House itself. He championed civil rights, defended the Enforcement Acts, and spoke for the freed people from whose ranks he had risen. He died at Georgetown on the first of August 1887. May the barber's son who first crossed that threshold be forever honored.