The United States Senate

Since its inception, just five African-Americans have served in the US Senate. In 1870, Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first African American senator. Five years later, Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi took the oath of office. It would be nearly another century, 1967, before Edward Brooke of Massachusetts followed in their historic footsteps. In 1993, Carol Moseley-Braun broke new ground again, becoming the first African American female to serve as U.S. senator. When Senator Barack Obama of Illinois took the oath of office on January 3, 2005, he became the fifth African American to serve and the third to be popularly elected.

Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first African American senator in 1870. Born in North Carolina in 1827, Revels attended Knox College in Illinois and later served as minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore, Maryland. He raised two black regiments during the Civil War and fought at the battle of Vicksburg in Mississippi. The Mississippi state legislature sent him to the U.S. Senate during Reconstruction where he became an outspoken opponent of racial segregation. Although Revels served in the Senate for just a year, he broke new ground for African Americans in Congress.

Blanche K. Bruce, born into slavery in 1841, spent his childhood years in Virginia where he received his earliest education from the tutor hired to teach his master's son. At the dawn of the Civil War, Bruce escaped slavery and traveled north to begin a distinguished career in education and politics. Elected to the Senate in 1874 by the Mississippi state legislature, he served from 1875 to 1881.