--- title: "Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce of Mississippi became the first two Black US senators in the 1870s" url: https://badiyaa.com/hiram-revels-blanche-bruce-mississippi-senators/ published: 2026-11-13T12:42:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-13T12:42:00+00:00 section: History publisher: Badiyaa --- # Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce of Mississippi became the first two Black US senators in the 1870s Hiram Revels took a Mississippi Senate seat on February 25, 1870; Blanche Bruce followed in 1875 and was the first Black senator to serve a full term. On February 25, 1870, Hiram Revels stood in the US Senate chamber and took the oath as a senator from Mississippi, the first African American to sit in either house of Congress. The galleries were packed, and everyone in them rose to watch. Five years later, a second Mississippian, Blanche K. Bruce, followed him into the same chamber and became the first Black senator to serve a full six-year term. Both men were chosen not by voters but by the Mississippi legislature, which is how every state picked its senators until the 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913. ## Revels: a minister, a prayer and a two-day fight Revels was born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on September 27, 1827. He trained as a barber, studied at Quaker-run schools in Indiana and at Knox College in Illinois, and was ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1845. During the Civil War he served as a Union Army chaplain and helped raise two regiments of the United States Colored Troops. By 1866 he was a pastor in Natchez, Mississippi. He became a city alderman in 1868 and a state senator a year later. Congressman John R. Lynch later wrote that an opening prayer Revels delivered in the Mississippi Senate in January 1870 “made Revels a United States Senator.” The legislature elected him 81 to 15 to fill a seat that had sat empty since Mississippi seceded in 1861. In Washington, Senate Democrats tried to block him for two days. Their argument leaned on the 1857 Dred Scott ruling: no Black man had been a citizen before the 14th Amendment, so Revels could not meet the nine-year citizenship rule. His backers answered that he had voted in Ohio long before, and that the war and the new amendments had buried Dred Scott. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts said, “The time has passed for argument. Nothing more need be said.” The Senate seated Revels by 48 votes to 8. His term ran only until March 3, 1871. In that time he argued against keeping Washington’s schools segregated and backed Black workers who had been shut out of jobs at the Washington Navy Yard. Next he went on to lead Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, today’s Alcorn State University, as its first president. ## Bruce: from slavery to the presiding chair Bruce was born enslaved near Farmville in Prince Edward County, Virginia, on March 1, 1841. He later said he won his freedom by going to Kansas once the Civil War began. He opened a school for Black children in Hannibal, Missouri, in 1864, then moved to Bolivar County, Mississippi, in 1868, bought Delta land and was elected county sheriff. The legislature sent him to the Senate in February 1874, and he served from 1875 to 1881. On February 14, 1879, he presided over the Senate, the first African American and the only formerly enslaved person ever to do so. At the 1880 Republican convention he picked up eight votes for vice president, another first. ## Two careers, side by side - **1870:** Revels seated on February 25; serves until March 3, 1871. - **1874:** Mississippi legislature elects Bruce in February. - **1875–1881:** Bruce serves the first full Senate term by a Black American. - **1879:** Bruce presides over the Senate on February 14. - **1881:** Bruce becomes Register of the Treasury, and his signature appears on US paper money. Put together, the two men held a Mississippi Senate seat for a little over seven of the 11 years between 1870 and 1881. Badiyaa has told other stories from the same century of Black American achievement, including [Benjamin Banneker’s 1791 almanac sent to Thomas Jefferson](https://badiyaa.com/benjamin-banneker-almanac-jefferson-1791/) and [Lewis Latimer’s 1882 filament patent](https://badiyaa.com/lewis-latimer-light-bulb-patent-252386/). Bruce’s Washington home at 909 M Street NW was named a National Historic Landmark in 1975, and a Senate-commissioned portrait of him by Simmie Knox was unveiled in the Capitol in 2001. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Hiram R. Revels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_R._Revels) - [Wikipedia: Blanche Bruce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_Bruce) *Image: Popular Graphic Arts, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*