Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Historian Canter Brown Jr. noted that in some states, such as Florida, the highest number of African Americans were elected or appointed to offices after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. The following is a partial list of notable African American officeholders from the end of the Civil War until before 1900.
In 1873, Lynch was elected as the first African-American Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives; he is considered the first Black man to hold this position in any state. He was among the first generation of African Americans from the South elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served in the 44th, 45th, and 47th Congresses.
The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral United States Congress, which is the legislative branch of the federal government of the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau , the term "African American" includes all individuals who identify with one or more nationalities or ethnic groups originating in any of the ...
Rep. Joseph H. Rainey, born into slavery in 1832, was honored Thursday for being the first Black member of the House by formally having a room in the Capitol named after him. Top lawmakers and a ...
After Congress passed the First Military Reconstruction Act of 1867 and ratified the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1870, African Americans began to be elected or appointed to national, state, county and local offices throughout the United States. [1] Four of the five office holders served in a New England state.
Revels was the first black member of the Congress overall. [11] Black people were a majority of the population in many congressional districts across the South. In 1870, Joseph Rainey of South Carolina was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first directly elected black member of Congress to be seated. [12]
Josiah Thomas Walls (December 30, 1842 – May 15, 1905) was a United States congressman who served three terms in the U.S. Congress between 1871 and 1876. He was one of the first African Americans in the United States Congress elected during the Reconstruction Era, and the first black person to be elected to Congress from Florida.
Congressman John R. Lynch later wrote of him in his book on Reconstruction: Revels was comparatively a new man in the community. He had recently been stationed at Natchez as pastor in charge of the A.M.E. Church, and so far as known he had never voted, had never attended a political meeting, and of course, had never made a political speech.