General Information

African American Members of the Tennessee General Assembly, 1873-2005

A total of 54 African Americans have been elected to the General Assembly
10 of them have been women
8 have served as Senators
2 moved to the Senate after serving for 10 years in the House of Representatives
All but one black legislator during Reconstruction were Republicans
All but one black legislator after Reconstruction were Democrats
House Joint Resolution 32 post-ratified the 15th Amendment in 1997.
Four black legislators are the subjects of Tennessee Historical Commission markers

African Americans in National Politics, 1870-2006

The first African American member of the U.S. Senate was Hiram Revels from Mississippi. He was elected by the state legislature on the very day (February 23, 1870) that Mississippi was readmitted to the Union.

The last black Senator of the 19th century was Blanche K. Bruce, also elected by the Mississippi state legislature. Bruce was the first African American to serve a full term in the Senate. He served from 1875-1881 and was the last African American in the U.S. Senate – from any state, North or South – until 1967.

In 1966 Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts became the first African American popularly elected to the U.S. Senate. Carole Moseley Braun of Illinois, elected in 1993, was the first black female Senator. Barack Obama, elected from Illinois in 2004, is only the third African American to be popularly elected to the Senate.

Joseph Hayne Rainey, a former slave from South Carolina, became the first African American popularly elected to Congress when he defeated Democrat C.W. Dudley in a special election. Sworn into the Forty-first Congress on December 12, 1870, he was re-elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for four more terms, serving until 1879, by which time “Jim Crow” legislation was beginning to affect the outcome of Southern elections.

Twenty-two African Americans from the South served in Congress during the 19th century. George Henry White, U.S. Representative from North Carolina during the years 1897-1901, was the last former slave to serve in Congress and the last African American member of the House of Representatives until the 1928 election of Oscar DePriest of Chicago. From DePriest’s election to the present day, there has always been some black representation in Congress although, before 1955, there were never more than two African Americans among the 435 House members.

It was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – 100 years after the end of the Civil War – that state-sanctioned voter discrimination officially came to an end.