Joseph Rainey: Georgetown's Barber Who Became America's First Black Congressman

On Prince Street in Georgetown, South Carolina, a two-story house built in the seventeen sixties witnessed one of the most improbable careers in American political history. This was the home of Joseph Hayne Rainey , born into slavery, trained as a barber, and destined to become the first African American sworn into the United States House of Representatives.

Rainey was born in Georgetown in eighteen thirty-two, the son of an enslaved man who had purchased his own freedom. During the Civil War, Confederate authorities forced Rainey to labor on fortifications in Charleston; he escaped with his wife to Bermuda, where he worked as a barber until the war ended. He returned to South Carolina in eighteen sixty-six and entered politics during Reconstruction, organizing Black voters and rising through South Carolina's Republican Party.

On December twelfth, eighteen seventy, Joseph Rainey took the oath of office and walked onto the floor of the House of Representatives. He was the first Black American to serve in that body , not just the first from South Carolina, but the first anywhere in the nation's nearly one-hundred-year history. He held his seat through four terms, serving more than eight years, making him the longest-tenured Black congressman until the nineteen fifties.

In the House, Rainey was direct and forceful. He demanded federal enforcement of civil rights in the South, called out Klan violence by name, and argued that the nation's founding promises applied to all of its citizens without condition. His colleagues heard him and, for the most part, did not act.

After Reconstruction collapsed and white supremacist Democrats regained control of South Carolina in eighteen seventy-six, Rainey's political career ended. He died in eighteen eighty-seven. The house on Prince Street is now a National Historic Landmark , a reminder of what this country briefly attempted and then abandoned.