HIRAM REVELS Senator from Mississippi; first African American senator
Born: September 27, 1827
Birthplace: Fayetteville, N.C.
Born a free black, Revels worked as a barber and as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. During the Civil War he helped recruit two regiments of African American troops in Maryland and served as the chaplain of a black regiment. After the war he moved to Natchez, Miss., where he was elected an alderman (1868) and a state senator (1870). In 1870 Revels was elected as the first African American member of the United States Senate. A few senators objected, arguing that Revels had not been a U.S. citizen for the nine years, a requirement for serving in the Senate--African Americans had only technically become citizens four years earlier, after the passage of the 1866 Civil Rights Act. But this ploy to keep him out of the Senate failed--the Senate voted 48 to 8 in favor of Revels. Revels served as senator from Feb. 25, 1870, to March 4, 1871. (His term was an abbreviated one because he was elected to complete the term vacated ten years earlier by Jefferson Davis, who left the Senate to become the president of the Confederacy.) After the Senate, Revels served as the president of a black college and returned to the ministry.
Died: Jan. 16, 1901
SHIRLEY ANITA CHISHOLM, a Representative from New York; born Shirley Anita St. Hill, November 30, 1924, in Brooklyn, Kings County, N.Y.; first black woman elected to Congress; attended public schools of Brooklyn, N.Y.; B.A., Brooklyn College, 1946; M.A., Columbia University, 1952; nursery school teacher, 1946-1953; director, Hamilton-Madison Child Care Center, New York City, 1953-1959; educational consultant, Division of Day Care, New York City, 1959-1964; assemblywoman, New York State Legislature, 1964-1968; elected as a Democrat to the Ninety-first and to the six succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1969-January 3, 1983); was not a candidate for reelection to the Ninety-eighth Congress in 1982; died on January 1, 2005, in Ormond Beach, Fla.; interment in Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo, N.Y. Died 2005.
MARY ANN SHADD CAREY was born in October 9th,1823 in Wilmington Delaware. Her family settled in Chatham. In 1850 or 1851 she moved to Windsor and opened a school for refugees in the ‘Old Barracks’ at the site of the former City Hall Square. She taught school there until 1853. In March of 1853 she launched The Provincial Freeman and became the first black woman publisher in North America. She was the editor and publisher of the weekly paper. The Provincial Freeman was a newspaper which promoted the abolitionist movement and provided information about the region that could assist those seeking to settle here. At one time she described Windsor by saying, “This is by universal consent the most destitute community of coloured people known in this province” the Times Website. She remained the editor of the paper until Reverend William Newman took over in 1855. She also published a booklet entitled ‘Notes on Canada West’ intended to help inform potential refugees about life in the region.
On January 3rd, 1856 she married Thomas Carey and they eventually relocated to Washington, D.C. where she passed away in 1893. She serves as a great role model for women as she said in her farewell address in the Provincial Freeman “To coloured women, we have a word – we have broken the Ice…(Adieu Prov. Freeman Aug 22 1855). She went on to be a well known journalist, orator, educator, lawyer and activist.
ALAIN LOCKE, a leading black intellectual during the early twentieth century and an important elder of the Harlem Renaissance, was born in Philadelphia in 1886, to middle-class parents, both of whom were educators. He graduated from Harvard in 1907 and proceeded to go to Oxford as the first African American Rhodes Scholar. He received a B.A. from Oxford in 1910 and elected to stay in Europe and study philosophy at the University of Berlin. He returned to the States in 1912 to assume an assistant professorship at Howard. In 1916 he continued his education at Harvard, where he completed a Ph.D., and later resumed his career at Howard. His anthology The New Negro, dedicated to "The Younger Generation," was published in 1925. The resourceful Locke was especially close and helpful to the young writers Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, and Rudolph Fisher. Somewhat paradoxically, he subscribed to Du Bois's Talented Tenth idea but also sought to remain connected to the "masses." He believed that the cultivation of more refined cultural tastes and production would bring black people the socioeconomic parity they sought. He died in New York City in 1954.
Source: William Banks, Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996)
DAVID WALKER,African American abolitionist(1785-1830) wrote Walker's Appeal, urging slaves to resort to violence when necessary to win their freedom.
David Walker was born free, of a free mother and slave father, in Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 28, 1785. He early learned to read and write, and he read extensively on the subjects of revolution and resistance to oppression. When he was about 30, he left the South, because "If I remain in this bloody land, I will not live long. As true as God reigns, I will be avenged for the sorrows which my people have suffered." In 1826 Walker settled in Boston, Mass., where he became the agent for Freedom's Journal, the black abolitionist newspaper, and a leader in the Colored Association. For a living he ran a secondhand clothing store.
Walker published an antislavery article in September 1828; with three others, it became the pamphlet Walker's Appeal (1829). The articles were articulate and militant in their bitter denunciation of slavery, those who profited by it, and those who willingly accepted it. Walker called for vengeance against white men, but he also expressed the hope that their cruel behavior toward blacks would change, making vengeance unnecessary. His message to the slaves was direct: if liberty is not given you, rise in bloody rebellion.
Southern slave masters hated Walker and put a price on his head. In 1829, 50 unsolicited copies of Walker's Appeal were delivered to a black minister in Savannah, Ga. The frightened minister, understandably concerned for his welfare, informed the police. The police, in turn, informed the governor of Georgia. As a result, the state legislature met in secret session and passed a bill making the circulation of materials that might incite slaves to riot a capital offense. The legislature also offered a reward for Walker's capture, $10,000 alive and $1,000 dead.
Other Southern states took similar measures. Louisiana enacted a bill ordering expulsion of all freed slaves who had settled in the state after 1825. The slaveholding South was frightened by men like Walker, and their harsh reactions to the threat they saw in Walker's Appeal seemed justified when black slave Nat Turner led his bloody rebellion in 1831.
Most abolitionists disagreed with Walker's advice to the slaves to resort to violence to obtain freedom. White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who believed in immediate emancipation but thought it could be accomplished through persuasion and argument, did endorse the spirit of the Appeal, however, and ran large portions of it, together with a review, in his paper, the Liberator. On the other hand, Frederick Douglass accepted a more activist position, probably due to Walker's influence and that of Henry H. Garnet, who also called for massive slave rebellions.
Walker died in Boston on June 28, 1830, under mysterious circumstances. His challenge to the slaves to free themselves was an important contribution to the assault on human slavery.
MARTIN ROBINSON DELANEY, African American intellectual (1812-1885), a journalist, physician, army officer, politician, and judge, is best known for his promotion before the Civil War of a national home in Africa for African Americans.
Martin Delany was born free in Charlestown, Virginia, on May 6, 1812. His parents traced their ancestry to West African royalty. In 1822 the family moved to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to find a better racial climate, and at the age of 19 Martin attended an African American school in Pittsburgh. He married Kate Richards there in 1843; they had 11 children.
In 1843 Delany founded one of the earliest African American newspapers, the Mystery, devoted particularly to the abolition of slavery. Proud of his African ancestry, Delany advocated unrestricted equality for African Americans, and he participated in conventions to protest slavery. Frederick Douglass, the leading African American abolitionist, made him coeditor of his newspaper, the North Star, in 1847. But Delany left in 1849 to study medicine at Harvard.
At the age of 40 Delany began the practice of medicine, which he would continue on and off for the rest of his life. But with the publication of his book The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (1852; reprinted, 1968), he began to agitate for a separate nation, trying to get African Americans to settle outside the United States, possibly in Africa, but more probably in Canada or Latin America. In 1854 he led a National Emigration Convention. For a time he lived in Ontario. Despite his bitter opposition to the American Colonization Society and its colony, Liberia, Delany kept open the possibility of settling elsewhere in Africa. His 1859-1860 visit to the country of the Yorubas (now part of Nigeria) to negotiate with local kings for settling African Americans there is summarized in The Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (1861; reprinted, 1969).
When Delany returned to the United States, however, the Civil War was in progress and prospects of freedom for African Americans were brighter. He got President Abraham Lincoln to appoint him as a major in the infantry in charge of recruiting all-African American Union units.
After the war Delany went to South Carolina to participate in the Reconstruction. In the Freedmen's Bureau and as a Republican politician, he was influential among the state's population, regardless of race. In 1874 he narrowly missed election as lieutenant governor. In 1876, as the Republicans began losing control of the state, Delany switched to the conservative Democrats. Newly elected governor Wade Hampton rewarded him with an important judgeship in Charleston. As a judge, Delany won the respect of people of all races. In 1878 he helped sponsor the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, which sent one ill-fated emigration ship to Africa. The next year his The Principia of Ethnology argued for pride and purity of the races and for Africa's self-regeneration.
When his political base collapsed in 1879, Delany returned to practicing medicine and later became a businessman in Boston. He died on January 24, 1885.
Sources
A recent biography of Delany is Victor Ullman, Martin R. Delany: The Beginnings of Black Nationalism (1971). A contemporary account is Frank A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (1868; repr. 1969). William J. Simmons, Men of Mark (1968), includes a biographical sketch. For the significance of Delany's black nationalist thought before the Civil War see Howard H. Bell, A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement 1830-1861 (1970).
A. PHILIP RANDOLPH, the most influential black labor organizer of the twentieth century, was born in Crescent City, Florida, in 1889. His father, a tailor and itinerant minister, wanted his son to be a clergyman, but Randolph became a labor organizer instead. After high school he went to New York and took classes at City College of New York. In 1925 he became a Socialist and, with Chandler Owen, organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It took ten years and several strikes for the Pullman Company to recognize the union. Randolph threatened a mass march in Washington, and the specter of such a march led President Roosevelt to establish the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). Recipient of an honorary LL.D. from Howard in 1941 and the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP in 1942, Randolph was elected the first black vice-president of the AFL-CIO. During World War II he fought for the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces, which President Truman mandated after much resistance from the military. He died in 1979 in New York City.
Source: William Banks, Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996)
ADAM CLAYTON POWELL, JR. was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 29, 1908. He rose to prominence in the early 1930s and 1940s as a preacher, civil rights activist, and national politician. On November 1, 1937, Powell succeeded his father as pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. During his early tenure as pastor, Powell substantially increased the size of the congregation through community outreach and inspired preaching.
In 1944, Powell was elected on the Democratic ticket to serve in the House of Representatives, representing Harlem’s 22nd Congressional district. When Powell took office in 1945, he became the first Black Congressman from New York. Although Powell was only one of two African American Congressional representatives, he successfully challenged de facto segregation on Capitol Hill. Black representatives were then prohibited from using Capitol dining areas, which were reserved only for the White Congressional leaders. However, Powell would bring Harlem residents to eat with him in these restaurants. Powell also confronted the racial bigotry of staunch segregationists like John E. Rankin of Mississippi on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Powell became Chairman of the prestigious and powerful Labor and Education Committee in 1961. During that decade, as a supporter of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society Program, Powell’s committee passed dozens of measures that authorized federal programs to improve education and training for the deaf, provide college student loans and public school lunches, and increase the minimum wage, thus expanding opportunities for all Americans, including African Americans.
On April 4, 1972, Powell died at the age of 63 of complications from prostate cancer at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Florida. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered over the Caribbean around Bimini.
Sources: Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of An American Dilemma (New York: Athenaeum, 1991); Will Haygood, King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
EDWARD BROOKE, born Oct. 26, 1919, Washington, D.C., was the first African American to be elected to the U.S. Senate in the 20th Century. He graduated from Howard University in 1941 and served in World War II as decorated captain in the combat infantry. After the War, he received two law degrees from Boston University and was editor of the law review. Shortly after beginning his law practice, Brooke entered politics as a Republican and ran twice for the Massachusetts legislature (1950 and 1952), loosing both times. Finally, after losing a bid for Secretary of State in 1960, Brook was elected Attorney General of Massachusetts and re-elected in 1964. In 1966 he was elected to the U.S. Senate and served two terms, loosing in 1978 to Democrat Paul Tsongas. Brooke opposed escalation of the Vietnam War and was the first Republican Senator to demand President Nixon’s resignation over Watergate. After leaving the Senate, Brooke resumed the practice of law, was Chairman of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition and, on June 23, 2004, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He is now battling breast cancer and lives in Miami, Fla.
CARL BURTON STOKES: Mayor of Cleveland, Ohio (1967 to 1971), first black mayor of a major American city. Born June 21, 1927, in Cleveland died April 3, 1996, in Cleveland.
When Stokes was only two years old his father died. The family struggled and was on welfare for a time. Stokes dropped out of high school to help support his family. He served in the Army right after World War II. After his discharge he finished high school, went on to graduate from the University of Minnesota and then finished Cleveland-Marshall Law School in 1956. Upon passing the bar exam, became an assistant prosecutor in Cleveland. Stokes entered politics and in 1962 was elected to the Ohio legislature. In 1965 he ran for mayor of Cleveland, but lost by a narrow margin. He ran again in 1967 and won. He tried to improve the economic condition of Cleveland, but hostility from the city bureaucracy and the police force and the overall tensions of the period of the late 60’s and early 60’s made it very difficult to achieve any success. African American groups opposing him planned and took violent action, resulting in shots being fired at Stokes’ home. Stokes did not run for a third two year term. Instead he moved to New York City and became a nationally syndicated columnist. He came back to Cleveland in 1980 when he was made general counsel to the UAW. He was then elected a municipal court judge and finally appointed U.S. Ambassador to the Seychelles (1994-95).
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