The Senator from Mississippi
Hiram Revels, Class of 1857
Revels was the first black man to serve in the United States Senate and became the founding president of Alcorn College.
After the Civil War, the Mississippi State Senate needed to fill two US Senate seats, one of which had been formerly occupied by Confederate President Jefferson Davis. They elected two men, Union General Adelbert Ames and Hiram Revels, Knox College Class of 1857. On February 25, 1870, Revels was sworn in as the first black man to serve in the United States Senate. For his part, Revels saw himself as "a representative of the state, irrespective of color." Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts made the closing argument for Revels' admission, declaring: "All men are created equal, says the great Declaration, and now a great act attests to this verity. Today we make the Declaration a reality."
Born to free parents of African, Scottish, and Croatan Indian heritage in 1827, Revels spent his childhood in North Carolina, a state where it was illegal to educate black children. Nonetheless, Revels attended a school run by a free black woman and worked as an apprentice in his brother's barber shop. In 1844, Revels moved north to study at the Beech Grove Quaker Seminary in Liberty, Indiana; he would also study in Ohio and at Knox College.
Before and after his year in the Senate, Revels worked as a pastor, often navigating community tensions between blacks and whites — in 1854, he was even arrested for preaching the gospel in a black community. Revels also served as the first president of Alcorn University, a school opened to avert integration at the University of Mississippi. Despite this, Revels remained a proponent of desegregation all his life. As he put it, "Let lawmakers cease to make the difference, let school trustees and school boards cease to make the difference, and the people will soon forget."