KeebleKeeble. This Nashville barber, businessman, and politician became the first African American elected to the Tennessee General Assembly.
Since 1870, when Senator Hiram Revels of Mississippi and Representative Joseph Rainey of South Carolina became the first African Americans to serve in Congress, a total of 175 African Americans have served as U.S. Representatives, Delegates, or Senators.
In 1870 Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first African American senator. Five years later, Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi took the oath of office. It would be nearly another century, 1967, before Edward Brooke of Massachusetts followed in their historic footsteps.
Henry McNeal TurnerThe Original 33, as they came to be called, references Henry McNeal Turner and 32 other African Americans elected to the Georgia legislature in 1868 during the Reconstruction era. In fact, they were among the first African American state legislators in the entire United States.Feb 8, 2021
In the first election (1868) after the Civil war, blacks were allowed to vote. But even though former slaves could now vote, there was no law that allowed black representatives to hold office. So, the 33 black men who were elected to the General Assembly were expelled.
12 black legislatorsAlthough a total of 12 black legislators served in the General Assembly in the 1880s, by the end of the decade there were none.
In 1868 Turner was elected as a representative to the Georgia state legislature. Soon after, he was among twenty-four legislators expelled for the “crime” of being black.
Long. Jefferson Franklin Long (March 3, 1836 – February 4, 1901) was a U.S. congressman from Georgia. He was the second African American sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives and the first African-American congressman from Georgia.
What was the goal of expelling African American legislators from the Georgia General Assembly during Reconstruction? To maintain white supremacy in state politics.
Thurgood Marshall poses in his New York residence on September 11, 1962, after the Senate confirmation of his nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Five years later, Marshall would become the first Black man to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Photograph by AP.
Then, in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson named Marshall the first Black solicitor general, designated to represent the federal government in Supreme Court cases.
His parents had named him Thoroughgood after his paternal grandfather, who was born into slavery and gained his freedom by escaping from the South, but Marshall shortened the name in grade school because he disliked its length.
In 1936 Marshall went to work for the NAACP full-time. The organization’s legal goal, developed by Houston and his growing team of civil rights lawyers, was to undermine segregation by making it onerous and unaffordable for states.
Over the years, Marshall became the face of civil rights litigation. He argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court, winning 29 of them, and participated in hundreds of other cases in lower courts nationwide.
In Murray v. Pearson, Marshall attacked the longstanding doctrine established in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v.
Though Marshall continued to litigate civil rights cases , he was exhausted by the vehemence of states’ resistance to integration. Marshall and his colleagues fought battle after battle as states defied the new law of the land—closing entire public school systems, creating charter schools, and even rioting rather than allow Black students to attend alongside white ones. In 1961, he got the chance for a change when President John F. Kennedy, eager to align his new Democratic administration with the nation’s star civil rights attorney, nominated Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Lloyd Barbee at King Memorial, 1968. Lloyd Barbee in a somber crowd at a memorial gathering for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. View the original source document: WHI 48141 View the original source document: WHI 48141
Barbee had already become involved with the NAACP and various political causes by the time he came to Milwaukee in 1962. In 1964, Barbee organized and led an alliance of civil rights activists dedicated to ending de facto segregation in Milwaukee called the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC).
In 1964, Barbee was elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly where he served until 1977.
See more images, essays, newspapers and records about Lloyd A. Barbee.
Tunis Campbell. Campbell, a native of New Jersey, was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. In 1864 he was appointed an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau on the Georgia Sea Islands.
Born in South Carolina, Bradley was a shoemaker in Augusta. Sometime around 1834 he ran away to the North, where he became a lawyer. In 1865 he returned to Georgia. He was the most outspoken member of the Black delegation to the constitutional convention. In 1868 he was elected state senator from the First District.