Happy New Year! I just saw today that one of my heroes as a youngster, Republican U.S. Senator Edward Brooke (1919-2015) of Massachusetts, has just passed away, after a long and productive life. He was widely hailed as the first African-American to be a United States senator(1966-1979) , but that is not correct, and leads to our monthly edition of trivia. DID YOU KNOW THAT THE FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN U.S. SENATOR TOOK OFFICE 145 YEARS AGO? FROM MISSISSIPPI Very true. Hiram Rhodes Revels was an African-American born in Maryland in 1827 who grew up to be a pastor in the AME church. During the Civil War, he helped to raised two regiments of black troops for the Union and became their chaplain, serving in combat in Mississippi. After the war he pastored a church in Natchez, Mississippi, and was elected to the state senate as a Republican. Impressed by his honesty and intellect, the state senate voted (81 to 15) in 1870 for Revels to be the first U.S. senator from Mississippi since the war began in 1861. He served out the existing term until 1871, and thus became the first African-American in history to be a United States Senator. But there was another interesting African-American senator from Mississippi soon afterward. Four years later, Blance Bruce, who had been born a slave in Virginia, was voted to be the U.S. senator from Mississippi, where he had moved in 1865 and devoted himself to the Republican Party causes. He served as senator in Washington from 1875 to 1881. He also was the first African-American to preside over the United States Senate in 1879, and the first to be Registrar of the U.S. Treasury (and thus have his name on U.S. currency) in 1881 (and again in 1897). So Edward Brooke wasnt the first black person to be a U.S. Senator, though he was the longest serving, and extremely well respected on both sides of the aisle. Brooke was the third, and it would be another fourteen years until the fourth African-American served as a U.S. senator. That was Democrat Carole Moseley Braun of Illinois, from 1993 to 1999. Barack Obama was the fifth (2005 to 2008) and since his senate time there have been four more, both Democrat and Republican, northerner and southerner, liberal and conservative. AND NOW YOU KNOW A LITTLE MORE ABOUT AMERICAN HISTORY....
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 20:01:39 +0000
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