Black History Fact of the Week
Hiram Rhoades Revels
Hiram Rhoades Revels was elected the first African American senator in the United States in 1870 and served until March 4, 1871. He was born in Fayetteville, NC, in about 1827. His date of birth has not been clearly identified. His parents were free people of mixed African and Croatan Native American descent.
Revels began to manage a barbershop, after his brother, whom he worked under at the barbershop, died in 1841. Three years later, he left the barbershop to obtain an education at Beech Grove Quaker Seminary in Liberty, Ind., and also attended Knox College in Ohio.
He later became a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and preached to African American congregations across the country.
During the Civil War, the preacher became a Union chaplain, serving with a Mississippi free Black regiment. Upon returning from the war, he went back to his pastoral duties, but also began a political career, when he was elected an alderman in Natchez, Miss. Eventually, he gained the respect of both African Americans and Whites, and in 1870, was elected to the U.S. Senate. But he only served a bit over a year. He was elected to finish the term of one of the state’s two seats in the U.S. Senate left vacant since the Civil War.
In 1871, he became president of Alcorn College and then on January 16, 1901, Revels died while attending a church conference in Aberdeen, Miss. For more Black history facts visit www.Black365.us.
As a young man, Kenyatta, who was born with the name Kamau wa Ngengi, worked alongside his medicine-man grandfather after his parents’ death. He also suffered from infections in his feet and one leg. At 10-years-old, he underwent surgery at the Church of Scotland mission, where he was exposed to Europeans. He then became a student at the mission.
He later worked as a clerk in the public works department of Nairobi; this is arguably where his interest in politics was initiated.
Statement by: Ms. Alice Huffman, president National Association for the Advancement of Color People California State Conference
We are here today to share with the public a report prepared and released by the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, which details various associations between Tea Party organizations and acknowledged hate groups in the United States.
The hyperbole around election time has reached a fever pitch as Republican candidates for the mid-term elections focus on attacking the source of the Democratic Party revival. Aiming at the low poll numbers of President Barack Obama, ideologues are now trying to frame the Obama presidency as change the country can no longer afford.
In 1961 the Freedom Riders were young, unafraid and bold enough to believe they could make a difference and combat Jim Crow segregation and bigotry in the Deep South.
The four courageous California college students—Edward Johnson, Robert Farrell, and Helen and Robert Singleton—participated in the rides, seeking to improve the lives of their southern brothers and sisters while clearly endangering their own.
Lyles Station in Gibson County at the tip of southwestern Indiana had been an important way station on the legendary “Underground Railroad,” the informal network of safe houses and people formed to assist fugitive slaves in their flight to Canada and freedom; it continued to be a prosperous community for the newly emancipated after the Civil War.
