Reconstruction Fact: 2000+ Black Men Elected, Including 2 US Senators

Southern states that were once demographically White and politically Democrats were now being challenged by the Radical Reconstruction-backed Republicans who logically held the Black vote. But with the election of President Andrew Johnson, his administration placed the power to control the political landscape back into the hands of those who had used it to deny and disenfranchise Black people.

The enthusiasm with which Republicans in Congress and the media heralded Revels’s admission to the Senate inspired the erroneous story common in the historical record that Revels took Davis’s former seat instead of Brown’s. See, for example, Gath, “Washington,” 17 March 1870, Chicago Tribune: 2; Christopher, Black Americans in Congress: 5–6; Stephen Middleton, ed., Black Congressmen During Reconstruction: A Documentary Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002): 320. 14Quoted in Lawson, The Gentleman From Mississippi:16, 22–23.

Composed mainly of those who had ... of the former slaves. Some 16 African-Americans served in Congress during Reconstruction, including Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce in the U. S. Senate, over 600 in state legislatures, and hundreds more in local offices, from sheriffs ...

Black voters were critical to the Republican Party’s electoral fortunes throughout the South during this period. By 1877, roughly 2,000 Black men held local, state, and federal offices throughout the South.18

After the American Civil War, during ... African American men were given the right to vote for and to be elected delegates to the convention, and 24 African American men were elected to the 1867–1868 Virginia Constitutional Convention, which created the Virginia Constitution ...

Browse documents by alphabetical order · Browse documents in specific collections

Once black men were given the right to vote, hundreds of qualified black legislators were elected to state · and national offices, even though the elections were riddled with threats and violence. Yet, despite all the · adversity facing freed Blacks, these groundbreaking politicians passed ...

Under universal male suffrage, the “black vote” was essential to elections and as a result, several Republican presidents were voted into office.(1) To reward those who had helped in their election, successful Republican politicians appointed more than 1,400 African Americans to political ...

In order to punish the White ... the right to vote. This resulted in at least 2,000 elected Black officeholders, including two United States senators and 21 representatives....