African Americans In The United States Congress
African Americans began serving in greater numbers in the United States Congress during the Reconstruction Era following the American Civil War after slaves were emancipated and granted citizenship rights. Freedmen gained political representation in the Southern United States for the first time. The Compromise of 1877 initiated the period that followed, known as Redemption among white southerners. White Democrats regained political power in state legislatures across the South and worked to restore white supremacy. State legislatures reduced voting by blacks by passing more restrictive electoral and voter registration rules, amending constitutions to the same ends from 1890–1910, and passing Jim Crow laws to establish racial segregation and restrict labor rights, movement and organizing by blacks. The Democratic Party essentially dominated the "Solid South" until the 1960s. As a result of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, the US Congress passed laws to end segregation and protect civil rights and voting rights.
During two waves of massive migration within the United States in the first half of the 20th century, more than 6 million African Americans moved from the South to northern and midwestern industrial cities. Some were elected to national political office from their new locations. During the Great Depression, many black voters switched allegiances from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party, in support of the New Deal economic, social network, and work policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. This trend continued in the 1960s. At the same time, there was a different movement among whites in the South, who began to vote for Republican candidates for national and then state offices.
A total of 123 African Americans have served in the United States Congress, most in the United States House of Representatives. This includes five non-voting members of the House of Representatives, who represented the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. An additional House candidate, John Willis Menard, was elected in 1868 but was not seated due to an election dispute.
Six African Americans have served in the U.S. Senate, two in the Republican Party from Mississippi during the Reconstruction Era and four more recently: three Democrats from Illinois (including Barack Obama) and one Republican from Massachusetts.
Read more about African Americans In The United States Congress: The Modern Era
Famous quotes containing the words african, americans, united, states and/or congress:
“If your buttocks burn, you know you have done wrong.”
—White South African proverb.
“It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they’re not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.”
—Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917)
“The boys dressed themselves, hid their accoutrements, and went off grieving that there were no outlaws any more, and wondering what modern civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss. They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The line that I am urging as today’s conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, a repudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“I need not tell you of the inadequacy of the American shipping marine on the Pacific Coast.... For this reason it seems to me that there is no subject to which Congress can better devote its attention in the coming session than the passage of a bill which shall encourage our merchant marine in such a way as to establish American lines directly between New York and the eastern ports and South American ports, and both our Pacific Coast ports and the Orient and the Philippines.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)