Hiram Rhodes Revels

Hiram Rhodes Revels (born September 27, 1827, Fayetteville, North Carolina, U.S.—died January 16, 1901, Aberdeen, Mississippi) was an American clergyman, educator, and politician who became the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate (1870–71), representing Mississippi during Reconstruction. He was a member of the Republican Party.

Born of free parents, young Revels traveled to Indiana and Illinois to receive the education that was denied him in the South. He was ordained a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1845 and eventually settled in Baltimore, Maryland, where he served as a church pastor and principal of a school for African Americans. Soon after the Civil War began (1861), he helped organize two volunteer regiments of African Americans for service in the Union army. Two years later he joined the Federal forces to serve as a chaplain to an African American regiment stationed in Mississippi.

After the war Revels settled in Natchez, Mississippi, to preach to a large congregation. Despite some misgivings about entering politics, he accepted appointment by the military governor as alderman (1868) and was later (1869) elected to the state senate. Although Revels was a Republican, he was anxious not to encourage race friction with white Southerners; he therefore supported legislation that would have restored the power to vote and to hold office to disenfranchised members of the former Confederacy. In January 1870 he was elected to the U.S. Senate to take the seat vacated by Albert G. Brown in 1861. During his term, Revels advocated for desegregation in the schools and on the railroads.

On leaving the Senate in 1871, Revels became president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (later Alcorn State University), a recently opened institution of higher education for African Americans near Lorman, Mississippi. In 1874, however, he was dismissed from the college presidency. In 1875 he helped overturn the Republican (carpetbag) government of Mississippi, defending his action on the grounds that too many politicians in that party were corrupt. He was rewarded by the Democratic administration, which returned him to the chief post at Alcorn in 1876, where he remained until his retirement in 1882.