|
|
“Time Works Wonders”
Iago. (Jeff Davis.) "For that I do suspect the lusty Moor hath leap'd into my seat: the thought whereof doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards."--Othello.
During Reconstruction, black men were elected to political office
for the first time in American history. They served at the local, state,
and national level, although at a ratio far below that of the percentage
of blacks in those constituencies.
In 1870, Hiram Revels of Mississippi, a Republican, became the first
black person elected to the U.S. Senate. Born a free black in North
Carolina, Revels was educated at Knox College (Illinois) and ordained a
minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He worked as a
pastor in various Northern and border states, and as a principal of a
school for black children in Baltimore, Maryland. During the Civil
War, once Congress authorized the use of blacks in the Union military,
Revels organized two black volunteer regiments in Maryland and served as
a chaplain to another black regiment in
Mississippi.
At the end of the war, Revels ministered to a black congregation in
Natchez, Mississippi, and entered politics during Reconstruction.
When Mississippi rejoined the Union in February 1870, the
Republican-controlled state legislature elected Revels to complete the
term of Jefferson Davis, who had left the Senate in
1861 upon Mississippi's secession and became president of the
Confederacy.
It is that ironic twist of fate, which saw a black man filling the
Senate seat previously held by a slave owner who became Confederate
president, which is the subject of Nast's cartoon. Here, Revels
is welcomed to the Senate chamber by a group of his fellow-Republican
senators (left to right): Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, Oliver
Morton of Indiana, Carl Schurz of Missouri, and Charles Sumner of
Massachusetts. Nast often tapped the plays of Shakespeare, which were
well known to nineteenth-century Americans, as sources of inspiration
and symbolism. In this cartoon, the artist portrays Davis as the evil
Iago, who schemed against the innocent Othello, the Moor (African).
At the term's conclusion on March 3, 1871, Revels left the Senate to
become the first president of Alcorn University (Mississippi), the first land-grant
college for black students. In 1874, he was dismissed by the
college board. He soon joined the Democratic party and helped to
oust the Republicans from power in the state. In gratitude, his
new political allies in the Democratic party reappointed him in 1876 as
president of Alcorn, where he served until his
retirement.
In addition to Revels, fifteen other black men served in Congress
during the Reconstruction era, including Blanche Bruce, a former slave
who was also elected to the Senate as a Republican from Mississippi
(serving 1875-1881). After Revels and Bruce left office, however,
it would be nearly 100 years until the next black, Republican Edward
Brooke of Massachusetts, was elected to the U.S. Senate (serving
1967-1979). The first black woman and black Democrat elected to the U.S.
Senate was Carol Moseley-Braun (serving 1993-1999).
Robert C. Kennedy
|
|
|
