Former slave Samuel A. McElwee became a lawyer and the most powerful Republican party leader in Haywood County during Reconstruction. He served in the Tennessee General Assembly for three terms: 1882-1888.
I'm Bobby Seale. The old cripple-foot Revolutionary Humanist. For the younger generation, many older friends say to me, and will tell you, that I'm some kind of sixties Black Panther ICON! No, No! I'm not a "Panther" sports figure
The first black representative from Florida, Josiah Thomas Walls had the unfortunate distinction of being the only black congressman to be unseated twice by opponents who contested his election.
Hiram Rhoades Revels was born a free man of African American and Indian descent in a slave state and became the first African American member of Congress.
Charles Diggs, the first black representative from Michigan, was born in Detroit on December 2, 1922. He was educated in Detroit's public schools and graduated from Miller High School in 1940. The same year he entered that University of Michigan at A
Barbara Jordan, b. Houston, Tex., Feb. 21, 1936, the first black U.S. congresswoman from the deep South, defended the cause of the poor and promoted civil rights legislation during her six years as a representative of Texas.
The linking of Hiram Revels, the first African in America to be elected to the United States Senate, with a blood relationship to Lewis Leary and extended kinship to John Copeland, members of Brown's army who died in the battle and on the Virginia ga
