Celebrating Rights and 
Responsibilities
Baltimore & the Fifteenth Amendment, May 19, 1870
An Interactive Historical Investigation by David Troy © 1996

HIRAM REVELS

Educator, leader, preacher and first black to sit in the U.S. Senate.

Portrait taken from James Beard Lithograph.

HIRAM REVELS was the first black to sit in the U.S. Senate. Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1822, he moved to Indiana and Illinois to obtain an education. He later came to Baltimore, where he worked as the principal of a school for blacks and as a church pastor. In 1861, he helped to organize the first two black regiments from Maryland, and he later settled in Mississippi, where he was elected to Congress in 1870. Later he served as president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, an institution of higher learning for blacks, near Lorman, Mississippi. He died January 16, 1901, in Aberdeen, Mississippi. Source: Summarized from Microsoft Encarta.

© 1996 David C. 
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