Hiram Rhodes Revels, Born in Fayetteville
Near Fayetteville, North Carolina
Fayetteville has a claim on one of the most consequential moments in American political history, and it is not as well known as it deserves to be.
Hiram Rhodes Revels was born here, in Fayetteville, on September twenty-seventh, eighteen twenty-seven, to free Black parents. In antebellum North Carolina, most free Black children were legally barred from formal schooling. But Revels found his way to education, reportedly attending a school run by a free Black woman, and went on to study in Indiana and Ohio.
He became a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, preached across several states, and during the Civil War helped organize two volunteer regiments of African American soldiers for the Union Army, serving himself as a chaplain.
After the war, during Reconstruction, Revels moved to Mississippi and entered politics. On January twentieth, eighteen seventy, the Mississippi state legislature elected him to the United States Senate. He took the oath of office on February twenty-fifth of that year.
Hiram Rhodes Revels became the first African American to serve in the United States Senate.
His opponents tried to block him on a technicality, arguing he had not been a citizen for the required nine years, a claim that rested on the logic that the Dred Scott decision had denied Black citizenship, citizenship Revels had always claimed as his birthright. The Senate rejected the argument and seated him.
He served for one year, championing education for Black Americans and speaking out against racial segregation, then returned to Mississippi to become president of Alcorn State University.
His birthplace, Fayetteville, does not trumpet this history loudly enough. But it is here. The first Black United States Senator was born in this city.
