Hiram Rhodes Revels Was the First Black U.S. Senator and the First President of Alcorn State University

Did you know that the first Black man to serve in the United States Senate went on to lead one of the nation’s first HBCUs? His name was Hiram Rhodes Revels, and his story runs straight through the heart of Black political and educational history.

Revels was born free on September 27, 1827, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He became an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1845 and later studied theology at Knox College in Illinois. As a preacher, he carried the gospel across Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, and Louisiana, building a reputation as a man of faith and conviction long before he ever held public office.

When the Civil War came, Revels put that conviction to work. According to the United States Senate, he helped organize regiments of African American soldiers in Maryland, served as a Union army chaplain in Mississippi, and established schools for freed people in Missouri. Education and liberation were, for Revels, the same fight.

In 1870, the Mississippi state legislature elected him to the United States Senate. On February 25, 1870, Revels took the oath of office and became the first African American ever to serve in that chamber. Three senators challenged his eligibility, questioning whether he had been a citizen long enough to qualify. The Senate voted 48 to 8 to seat him, and history was made.

His Senate term was brief, ending on March 3, 1871, but his work was far from finished. That same year, Revels returned to Mississippi to become the first president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, known today as Alcorn State University. As the National Park Service notes, the institution was the first land-grant college in the United States established for Black students. Revels led the school through its earliest years, guiding it until his retirement in 1882, and he later taught theology at what would become Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi.

Revels died on January 16, 1901, in Aberdeen, Mississippi, still serving the AME Church he had joined more than half a century earlier. He remained, to the end, both a minister and an educator.

More than 150 years later, Alcorn State University still stands as a living monument to the man who first led it, and the halls of the U.S. Senate still bear the mark of the barrier he broke. Hiram Rhodes Revels showed that Black leadership and Black education have always belonged at the center of American life. This is a fact.

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