On Jan. 5, 2021, Raphael Warnock became the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate from Georgia. He also became the first Black Southern senator in 150 years to be elected by African American voters. Republican Sen. Tim Scott, an African American from South Carolina, won a historic election in 2016. However, Scott’s victory was actually achieved despite Black voters, 90 percent of whom supported his opponent. Warnock’s triumph is a significant moment in Black Southern politics and the realization of a dream long deferred.
But this victory is also fragile. The news of Warnock’s election was soon eclipsed by an armed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, an ongoing effort to undermine the results of the 2020 elections.
Long before Warnock’s election, another Black clergyman — Hiram Revels — made history when he became the nation’s first Black U.S. senator in 1870. Both Warnock and Revels were elected by the power of Black voters, and they each offered great hope to Southern Black political activists that their voices could be counted. But both victories were also achieved during times when Black voting rights were hotly contested. The lessons from the era of Revels show that even watershed moments must be protected in perpetuity for democracy to advance.
Revels’s road to the U.S. Senate was not easy. It began during the era of slavery and was realized only five years after the end of the Civil War. Born in 1827 to free parents in Fayetteville, N.C., Revels learned to read in a Black private school before attending seminary schools in Indiana and Ohio. He became an ordained minister in the AME Church and traveled across the North during the 1840s and 1850s. Revels eventually settled in Baltimore, where he remained a minister and became the principal of a Black school.
When the Civil War began, he helped organize Black regiments to help win the war and emancipate enslaved Black Americans. After the war, he accepted an appointment as minister of the newly formed Zion Chapel AME Church in Natchez, Miss. An educated and charismatic leader, he quickly became involved in politics. After serving as a local alderman, he successfully ran for state senate.
Revels was able to run for office because Mississippi was occupied by federal troops during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. That occupation enabled the right of Black men to vote in 1867, giving political power to formerly enslaved men amid an atmosphere of simmering racial resentment and the threat of violence that was only tenuously held at bay by U.S. troops. That right to vote was further cemented in 1870 when Mississippi and the rest of the former Confederate states ratified the 15th Amendment, which ruled that states could not limit citizens’ voting rights based on race.
During Reconstruction, African Americans made up a majority of Mississippi’s population. Black men — but not women — freely exercised their political rights as citizens and elected 30 Black officials to the 117-member state legislature by 1870. These successes were stunning considering that many White Southerners were still struggling to imagine Black people as freed, let alone active political participants or legislators.
When Mississippi reentered the Union that same year, the state needed two new senators to replace Jefferson Davis and Albert G. Brown, the state’s slave-owning secessionist senators who had forfeited their seats when Mississippi left the Union. This was before the 17th Amendment enabled the direct election of senators, back when state legislatures decided who would represent their constituents in the U.S. Senate. Mississippi’s African American legislators — themselves elected by Black voters — pushed for one of their own to be appointed. In that moment, they dreamed not only of a nation without slavery but also one in which Black people could become full participants in the democracy. Revels was their choice.
White Southerners objected to the appointment. They contended that Revels was ineligible for service because in their eyes he had only recently become a citizen. This argument was based on the 1857 Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. Sandford, which ruled that Black Americans could not become citizens of the United States. But these efforts were thwarted by advocates of racial equality, most notably Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Mass.), the champion of Black civil rights, who argued on Feb. 25, 1870 that “for a long time it has been clear that colored persons must be Senators.”
“What we do today,” Sumner argued in support of Revels, “is not alone for ourselves, not alone for that African race now lifted up. It is for all everywhere who suffer from tyranny and wrong.” That same day, Revels took his historic oath of office.
Revels served only a little over a year before the term he assumed expired and he retired to become the president of Alcorn University. In 1874, Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi was elected by the state legislature to be America’s second Black senator, serving from 1875 to 1881.
But this experiment in meaningful democracy ended when White supremacists retaliated against Black citizens exercising their right to vote. In 1875, White supremacists executed a violent overthrow of the Mississippi legislature, complete with canons and guns — as well as massive voter fraud to suppress Black voters. The next year, South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana saw similar episodes of election-based violence, leading to contested electoral votes in the 1876 presidential election. Ultimately, the compromise that elevated Republican Rutherford B. Hayes into the presidency entailed the withdrawal of troops from the South and the end of Reconstruction.
Over the coming decades, Black Southern political power was stamped out through violence and the passage of Jim Crow laws. Designed to circumnavigate the 15th Amendment, these measures imposed voter suppression methods, including poll taxes and literacy tests specifically designed to disfranchise African Americans.
It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s that Black Americans once again forced the United States to reckon with the promises of Reconstruction. Key developments such as Brown v. Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were all based on Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments — not just moral suasion. Millions of new Black voters joined the rolls. But by the time those victories came, millions of African Americans had already fled the South to escape the terrors of Jim Crow, and, thus, the potency of Black voting blocs was diminished, especially as more White Americans turned to the Republican Party. No Democratic candidate for president has won the majority of the national White vote since African Americans regained their own right to vote.
And so, Warnock represents the realization of a latent dream — that a Black Southern senator can once again be elected by Black voters. It has happened before, but not in 150 years. There is much reason for African American voters to rejoice and even for Black voters outside Georgia to dream.
But there is also good cause to closely guard this victory. A month after Revels entered office in 1870, he urged his Northern constituents to protect Black voting rights across the South because, as he asserted in honoring Black Civil War soldiers, “the colored race saved to the noble women of New England and the middle states men on whom they lean today for security and safety.” At the dawn of Warnock’s Senate term — with the outgoing president impeached for his role in inciting the violent insurrection at the Capitol and continuing to cast doubt on the 2020 election results — Americans would be well-served to recognize the contemporary resonance of Revels’s claim of Black people’s contributions to the salvation of American democracy.