In 1866 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Reconstruction Act, which dissolved all governments in the former Confederate states (except Tennessee) and divided the South into five military districts to protect the rights of the newly freed blacks. The act required that the ex-Confederate states ratify constitutions conferring citizenship rights on blacks or forfeit their representation in Congress.
As a result of these measures, blacks acquired the right to vote across the Southern states. In several states (notably Mississippi and South Carolina) blacks were the majority of the population, and were able, in coalition with pro-Union whites, to take control of the state legislatures, which at that time elected members of the United States Senate. In practice, however, only Mississippi elected black Senators. On February 25, 1870, Hiram Revels became the first black member of the Senate.
After the deal with the southern states that secured the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, however, Republican interest in southern blacks faded, and the white Democrats gradually regained control of the Southern legislatures and restricted the rights of blacks to vote. The last black Congressman elected from the South was George W. White of North Carolina, elected in 1897. After his term expired in 1901, there were no blacks in the Congress for 28 years.
The migration of blacks from the South to northern cities such as New York and Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s began to produce black-majority Congressional districts. In 1928Oscar DePriest won the 1st Congressional District of Illinois (the South Side of Chicago) as a Republican, becoming the first black Congressman of the modern era.
DePriest was defeated by a Democrat in 1934: he was the last black Republican in the House for 56 years. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 led a shift of black voting loyalties from Republican to Democrat as the Democrats became the party of economic advancement and (some time later) civil rights for black Americans. By the 1960s virtually all black voters were Democrats. Two black Republicans have been elected since 1991, but both from white-majority districts.
At the redistricting following the 1990census, however, southern states were required by a series of court decisions to create districts with black majorities. This was done by a process of gerrymandering, often creating grotesquely-shaped districts to link widely separated black communities. In this way black members were elected from Alabama, Florida, rural Georgia, rural Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia for the first time since Reconstruction. Additional black majority districts were also created in this way in California, Maryland and Texas. This greatly increased the number of black-majority districts.
This process was naturally supported by black Democrats, but it was also supported by Republicans, since the process of segregating black voters into black majority districts required removing black voters from all the other districts, making them easier for Republicans to win. It also had the effect of making the Democratic Party more clearly "black" in Southern states, thus further alienating white voters. By 2000 most white-majority House districts in the South were held by Republicans.
Since no state has had a black majority since the 1940s, blacks can only be elected to the United States Senate with the assistance of white voters. Three African Americans have been elected to the Senate in the modern era: Edward W. Brooke, a liberal Republican from Massachusetts, and Carol Moseley Braun and Barack Obama, both Democrats from Illinois.
List of African Americans in the United States Congress
