FIRST BLACK SENATORS

Senators of African descent from the state of Mississippi were empty clouds that promised rain that never fell. Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce were such clouds. Hopeful in appearance but lacking in substance . Mississippi “readmission” to the Union, after the Civil War In 1870 was shoe-horned politically by the pretense of its acceptance of the fact of the end of chattel slavery and its acceptance of the amended constitution of the United States. No better way to carry out the hoax than to send two black senators to Washington as proof of its change, and at least one Representative of African descent : Mr. Robert Lynch. While it is better that these few men were in Congress, than not to have been, the bedazzling allure of elective office did detract from the fact that the state of Mississippi—my birth state-remained notoriously ‘unreconstructed’ despite the show of election pretense resulting in the several African American officials: whose dark presence deceived the nation into believing a falsehood. By ‘notoriously unreconstructed’ is meant that Mississippi did not ever ratify the 13th Amendment of 1865, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude, until 2013! By then, Hiram Revels had served out the remainder of Confederate States of America’s traitorous president, Jefferson Davis’, post-secession, one-year remaining term in the United States Senate 1870-1871. By then also Blanche K. Bruce had been elected to and completed his full six-year term ending in 1881, the same year of President James M. Garfield’s political assassination. Hiram Revels, an iconic African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church pastor, and the first black Alcorn University president, was the first man of African descent to serve in Congress —House or Senate—and his example surely inspired others to do as he had done; if he did not redirect the focus to politics after freedom from thralldom in 1865. Senator Hiram Revel’s next African American successor (following Gov. Alcorn, a white man), Blanche K. Bruce, was a wealthy Mississippi delta landowner, with thousands of acres of land. Bruce certainly had done so , redirected the focus to political office, in the fading days of feigned national Reconstruction. Politics, in short , took priority and took precedence over economics: land redistribution to former slaves, and the education of former slaves. That pattern still prevails into 2019.