Government
Hiram Rhodes Revels
Hiram Rhodes Revels (1822-1901), was the first African American to serve in the United States Senate. He was a Republican senator from Mississippi from 1870 to 1871. He completed the unfinished term of Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy. In the Senate, Revels supported civil rights for blacks.
Revels was born free in Fayetteville, N.C. He was educated at seminaries in Indiana and Ohio and attended Knox College . In 1845, he became a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Revels helped establish black churches and schools in the Midwest and the South. During the Civil War (1861-1865), he recruited black soldiers for the Union Army. In 1866, he settled in Natchez , Miss. He became an alderman and later served as a state senator. After completing his term in the U.S. Senate, he was named president of Alcorn University (now Alcorn State University )
Barbara Jordan
Jordan (Feb. 21, 1936 – Jan. 17, 1996) taught political science at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama for one year before returning to Houston in 1960 to take the bar examination and set up a private law practice.
She ran for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives in 1962 and 1964, but lost both times. However, she made history when she was elected to a newly drawn Texas Senate seat in 1966, becoming the first Black to serve in that body since 1883. She was the first Black woman to serve in the Texas legislature.
On March 21, 1967 she became the first Black elected official to preside over that body; she was the first Black state senator to chair a major committee, Labor and Management Relations, and the first freshman senator ever named to the Texas Legislative Council.
When the Texas legislature convened in special session in March, 1972, Jordan was unanimously elected president pro tempore. She ran for Congress in 1972, and was elected from the newly drawn Eighteenth Congressional District in Houston .
Colin Powell
Gen. Colin Powell was the first African-American and the youngest officer ever to serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ranking officer in the United States military. Most Americans got their first vivid impressions of General Powell in this role, at his televised press briefings during the Gulf War. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed him Secretary of State, a position that placed him at the head of America 's foreign policy, and fourth in line of succession to the Presidency itself. He served throughout the first term of the Bush administration, a period that included the September 2001 attacks on the United States and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq . He remains one of the most admired Americans, a leader whose prestige transcends party and ideology.
Condoleeza Rice
Condoleezza Rice became the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, commonly referred to as the National Security Advisor, on Jan. 22, 2001 . She is the first African-American woman to be appointed to the post.
As professor of political science, Dr. Rice has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the highest teaching honors -- the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.
From 1989 through March 1991, the period of German reunification and the final days of the Soviet Union , she served in the Bush Administration as Director, and then Senior Director, of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council, and a Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, she served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1997, she served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender -- Integrated Training in the Military.
Rice has been nominated for the office of Secretary of State, the first African American woman to earn the nomination.
Douglas Wilder
Douglas Wilder became the first African American to be elected governor when Virginia voters chose him to lead their state in 1989. (In 1872, another African American, P. B. S. Pinchback, briefly served as governor of Louisiana after the sitting governor was impeached, but Pinchback was never elected to the post). A decorated hero of the Korean War (1950-1953), Wilder began his political career as Virginia state senator (1969-1985) and later served as Virginia's lieutenant governor (1985-1989) before being elected governor. His success as a Democrat in a largely white, Republican state stemmed from his position as a "healer" of racial strife, his moderate views on social policy, and his fiscal conservatism. Wilder was recently elected mayor of Richmond, Va.
Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett
Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett became the first black diplomat and the first black to receive a major government appointment. He was appointed minister to Haiti in 1869 by President Grant. |
