Black History Partially Reconstructed

Malcolm A. Kline, August 30, 2011
With the unveiling of a controversial memorial to slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, it is useful to explore the black history that academia ignores.
For example, the first African-American elected by popular vote to the U. S. Senate was Edward Booke, R-Massachusetts, first voted into the upper chamber in 1966, when President Obama was five-years old. Indeed, of the half-dozen black senators who have served in the Senate in the history of the republic, one-third came from the Deep South.
Yet and still, they were sent to Washington during Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War. Both came from the same state—Mississippi. The state legislature there chose them for the task of representing Mississippi in the nation’s capital.
The first of these, Hiram Rhodes Revels, “favored universal amnesty for former Confederates, requiring only their sworn loyalty to the Union,” and “successfully appealed to the War Department on behalf of black mechanics from Baltimore who were barred from working at the U.S. Navy Yard in early 1871, an accomplishment he recalled with great pride.”