First black Senator and Representatives: Sen. Hiram Revels (R-MS), Rep. Benjamin S. Turner (R-AL), Robert DeLarge (R-SC), Josiah Walls (R-FL), Jefferson Long (R-GA), Joseph Rainey and Robert B. Elliott (R-SC)
The first African Americans to serve in the United States Congress were Republicans 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. Democrat 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 U.S. Congress passed laws to end segregation and protect civil rights and voting rights.
The election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 led to a shift of black voting loyalties from Republican to Democrat, as Roosevelt's New Deal programs offered economic relief to people suffering from the Great Depression. From 1940 to 1970, nearly five million blacks moved north and also west, especially to California, in the second wave of the Great Migration. By the 1960s, virtually all black voters were Democrats and most were voting in states outside the former Confederacy.
It was not until passage through Congress of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, recognizing years of effort on the part of African Americans and allies in the Civil Rights Movement, that blacks within the Southern states recovered their ability to exercise their rights to vote and to live with full civil rights. Legal segregation ended. Accomplishing voter registration and redistricting to implement the sense of the law took more time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Ameri...
Posted By: Cynthia Merrill Artis
Monday, January 14th 2013 at 1:09PM
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